Wednesday, November 11, 2009

mysteries of life

I have all sorts of questions lately. Well, if I'm being honest, this is not a new phenomenon. Probably every hour or so I have a WTF moment, and it could be that I have more stress and less sleep in my life than is ideal.

Why do so many people comma splice all over the place? How hard is it to seperate independent clauses with a semicolon, coordinating conjunction, or even better, just stick in a period and make two perfectly nice sentences? This is one of my grammar peeves and I can't overlook it.

Relatedly, is there a comma shortage? I keep seeing egregious displays of comma neglect. Granted, I can go overboard sometimes, and I do acknowledge a very small number of cases where a technically correct sentence might be more elegant if a comma was omitted, but in many cases, commas are essential to meaning.

Why do the coffee shops on campus offer up stir sticks that are far shorter than the coffee cups? I can't reach the sugar crystals that settle to the bottom of my cup without literally sticking my fingers into the coffee. My solution is to pour the coffee about a third of the way up, throw in sugar and milk and stir, then top up with more coffee. This is far more fussing than is ideal.

1 comment:

Christin Hilton said...

Too funny! I'm not a grammar expert by and means, but I feel strongly that the semicolon doesn't get enough attention. It's such a useful little gem!