Cecelia Watson, Semicolon
Okay, sure, coronavirus, but also: punctuation, what's up with that, anyway, am I right? In theory, there'll still be a world whenever the heck we're done with COVID-19. In that world, we'll need to behave ethically, and we'll need to be able to communicate. To do those two crucial things, goddamn it we're going to need semicolons. To be clear, Cecelia Watson 's fascinating 2019 book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark wasn't presaging the global pandemic. But Watson's is a history with something of a utopian politics, imagining a better world being build on the shattered remains of a hide-bound former system that was failing all of us, and I'm ready to read more of that : We could not (and maybe we would not want to) go back to a time before there were no punctuation rules. But maybe we can think beyond them now, to develop a new , more functional, more ethical philosophy of punctuation: one that would supp
