At last! The quarter colon

Question

We have waited long but not in vain:http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html"The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use starting in June of 2004. This is the first new punctuation mark added to the English language since IGSO approved the exclamation mark in 1914.""IGSO also released guidelines for proper use of a quartercolon. Here are a few of the new rules:a.. Between items in a list when the words are in alphabetical order, or one item is more than eight letters long. Like in the sentence: He ate apples bananas and pears.b.. When a sentence already contains a semicolon, but another independent clause is needed.c.. When quoting someone with a Cockney accent.There are twelve other uses, but most would only be used in rare occasions, like in final exams and job interviews."John DeanOxfordbegin 666 quarter colon.gifM1TE&.#EA!0`.`*(``!$1$=W=W8B("(B(LS,S ```/ R'Y! `` E+ ``%``X```,7&gt;+Kend

Usenet · Accepted Answer

"John Dean" (Email Removed) schrieb im Newsbeitrag
[nq:1]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use ... are twelve other uses, but most would only be used in rare occasions, like in final exams and job interviews."[/nq]
Hehe. :-)
But shouldn't it be called the "demi-semi-colon"?

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use ... but most would only be used in rare occasions, like in final exams and job interviews." John Dean Oxford[/nq]
Is that what the attachment represents? I thought a mouse had got inside my monitor.
Cheers, Sage

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The ... in final exams and job interviews." John Dean Oxford[/nq]
[nq:1]Is that what the attachment represents? I thought a mouse had got inside my monitor. Cheers, Sage[/nq]
Virtual colonoscopy.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use ... are twelve other uses, but most would only be used in rare occasions, like in final exams and job interviews."[/nq]
Because you didn't check the punctuation of (a) properly in your haste to cut and paste this gem, I was puzzled and clicked on the URL. This has caused me considerable distress. First I noticed that on the web page "smiley" is spelled "smilie" which set my teeth on edge. I then made the mistake of clicking on the link to "Bob from Accounting".

Who writes this stuff? They could take a lesson from the far more sophisticated http://www.cynicalbastards.com/ubs/index.html (strangely, UBS does not appear in the Guardian university league table today..)

Laura
(emulate St. George for email)

Usenet · Answer

Au contraire, my checking was meticulous. I am suffering a strange phenomenon since upgrading to XP. When I copy and paste, the item appears, before posting, with all the attributes of the original source - colours, fonts etc. But it appears after posting as plain text (my OE is set to post only in plain text) except it occasionally produces a weird result. A post in another group manifested a strange attachment that none of us could account for. >And this post omitted the quarter-colons from example (a) but added one at the end.

I don't know what's happening. I get the same problem with copying and pasting from OED with the additional problem that hidden markers ( like 'name=') appear. I have taken to converting all the paste to rich text and then back to plain text. This renders the markers visible and I can then delete them. But it is annoying and I haven't yet found a way of going back to the situation I had in Win98 where whatever was pasted appeared in plain text, regardless of source formatting.

John Dean
Oxford

Usenet · Answer

"John Dean" (Email Removed) schrieb im Newsbeitrag
[nq:2]new > punctuation mark added to the English language since ... this gem, I was puzzled and clicked on the URL.[/nq]
[nq:1]Au contraire, my checking was meticulous. I am suffering a strange phenomenon since upgrading to XP. When I copy and ... back to the situation I had in Win98 where whatever was pasted appeared in plain text, regardless of source formatting.[/nq]
Uh... how do you expect the quartercolon to show up in plain text? It's an image. The quartercolon doesn't exist in real life. So when converting to plain text, OE did the only thing it could: it removed the image from the flow of the text and sent it as an attachment.
The way to avoid this problem is to copy and paste into a text editor such as Notepad. Then just copy and paste that into a post.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The ... in rare occasions, like in final exams and job interviews."[/nq]
[nq:1]Hehe. :-) But shouldn't it be called the "demi-semi-colon"?[/nq]
No, when I was in grad school at West 'Gin Anabaptist I was fortunate enough to be recruited as rapporteur when we hosted a very distinguished working group on the subject. The Group had been scheduled for two weeks, but inevitably over-ran by nearly another fortnight (chiefly because of the dogged determination of Prince Michael of Kent, who was there as HM representative; the subject being, as the organizers had clearly understood, at least in part, 'the Queen's English') and the final consensus was for 'hemi-semi-colon'.There was nearly a nasty incident when a Turkish-American professor in a northern college of impeccable credentials (those in the main stream of the subject will know who I mean, but it would be pointless to name names for a more general public) made strenuous efforts to gain support for a minority report (which all but swayed the entire working party) in favour of 'demi-semi-colon'. It was finally, however, the general feeling of the conference that he had most uncharacteristically allowed ancestral political considerations to cloud his linguistic judgement: the alarming moment was when he suggested, unexpectedly and apparently irrelevantly, that the 'hemi' party had been unduly influenced by the fact that Prince Philip was a Greek.

An anti-imperialist faction developed around this unexpected nucleus one Professor from Southern Baptist even went so far as to mention that he was descended on his mother's side from John Hancock, and that he was going to be "cornswoggled" if... but tempers were eventually assuaged by an overwhelmingly soothing "I say, old chap" approach from the Harvard representative, supporting the Duke of Kent's position, and pointing out that Philip Mountbatten was in fact vaguely Danish but essentially German.

The Turkic approach, over a couple of days, rather crumbled from this point. I don't know about you, but I was profoundly relieved: the idea that English on either side of the Pacific or Atlantic might in the fulness of time become officially agglutinative was deeply disturbing.
(My report was published in JEPS 297 if anybody wants details, but I hardly think it's worth the effort.)
Mike.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Au contraire, my checking was meticulous. I am suffering a ... was pasted appeared in plain text, regardless of source formatting.[/nq]
[nq:1]Uh... how do you expect the quartercolon to show up in plain text?[/nq]
I didn't.

John Dean
Oxford

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]We have waited long but not in vain: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/quartercolon.html "The International Grammar Standards Organization has approved the quartercolon for use starting in June of 2004. This is the first new punctuation mark added to the English language since IGSO approved the exclamation mark in 1914."[/nq]
Did they have anything to say about the hemi-demi-semicolon?

Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

At last! The quarter colon

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