Favorite punctuation?
 

Mine is the semi-colon; I just love it.

ellipsis...I use it far too often.

.?!

?-??

Interrobang is the posited name for the !?, but I don't think it has an ASCII yet.

I get particularly excited by diacritics and, in my personal writings, tend to enjoy Diaereses of the 'coördinate' sort.

The vagaries of propriety tend towards obstinancy and obscuranticism in effect, while appealing towards hyper-correctitude and simplicity; precisely the sort of paradox that appeals to me. Perfection terminally in absentum; "human, all too human" indeed.

I get annoyed with my interminable parentheses - of the properly grammatical sort - which serve only to obviate the intrangible, in-negotiable vacillations of the self, presented in writing.

I absolutely loathe ellipses, I really can't explain how they irritate me so.

Today I've been reading about rhetorical devices - I discovered the 5 sorts of hyperbaton and the exciting revelation that an argument I've been having for about 2 years with a good friend could easily have been resolved if either of us realised that a linguistic trope and a philosophical trope were different categories of the same word (homonymy).

damn....

did you just spell something wrong.....!?

that wiki link is for "diacritics"....

just askin'....




... :)

i think my brain just exploded.

§؟₣‡¶ and so do you!

I'm forever spelling things wrong, it's just that the standard of criticism here is so low that noöne ever notices. And I usually pick up on spelling shortly after posting.

You're all homonyms.
Semi colons are my top favourite, but there will always be a place in my heart for my beloved parenthetical comma. Mmmmmm imbed those subordinate clauses baby, yeah!

Irony mark is my favorite, I really love it => ؟

í Č wút ü did thår.

my favorite punctuation is also emily dickinson's-- the dash-- which indictes not a mere grammatical break but a pause in thought:

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --
For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --
The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --
For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --
And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --

Emily Dickinson -- Prude Central

bah-- she was a twisted little pervert -- in the inside.




(and we're talking about XIX century women, mr. 20/20 hindsight)

I don't think anyone else ever got the chance to find out.

there was something camille paglia wrote about sadomasochism in emily dickinson.

i'll see if i can find

here a quote i could fish out of wikipedia:

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

--
decipher at will! i'm not touching that...

paglia also did a reading of one of dickinson's poems in this book

Camille Paglia has one of the most annoying voices and speech styles ever, to the point where I have a hard time even reading things she's written because I hear that fucking voice in my head while I read.

Oh by the way, !@#$%! is by definition the thread master...

ps- she was a goth chick— the kind you like


Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—
Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—
Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—

The kind of goth chicks I like probably won't die virgins, but I'll give Emily a few points for depressing content.
I had to do a report on her in school once.

I have semi-colon cancer and for some reason I love the question mark.
Dashes and parenthesis are also pretty rad.

Susan Howe's My Emily Dickenson is the only critical work I can think of which anybody really needs to read. An excerpt:
" Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate "higher" female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and "unladylike" outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on inteIlectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a "sheltered" woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. "He may pause but he must not hesitate"-Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split American in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition."

A prude? Hell, she basically invented a grammar! Don't let anyone tell you Emily Dickenson isn't still experimental poetry.

Anyway, my favourite is the "M" dash.
I can't generate it on here but if you open WORD and type two words--and in between them type two dashes with no spaces then you've got it. It is fucking beautiful! So long....
I also love the Hamza in Arabic (ء) which can be a letter in itself, but it can also be used as a diacritic! It means "make a glottal stop" which is that sound that replaces the "tt"in Cockney English "butter", or the throat sound in "uh oh".

em dash:
—
M
N
same width as the M

My American Issues teacher had a fantasy band, called The Schwa Sound (backwards & upsidedown "e"). His reason for it was because everytime someone would chant for them, it would be "uh, uh, uh, uh!"

wiki forgot to mention the giant wooden staves that they wield!

--disgusting!

I love tildes!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I took on the ellipses followed by a question mark from reading Wayne Coyne's bizarre liner notes.

Gives that kind of stoner-esque hanging confusion that is so beautiful... ?

It's much better when they're touching, though
...?

I like it when people spell "you're" and "they're" correctly.

True.

I'm partial to the period--if only to disrespect E.E. Cummings. The smug bastard.

¿My favourite punctuation? ¡It's the way they use the inverted question and exclamation marks in Spanish!

till his noodle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions, and misalignments.

you should have put that quote in the summarize sex life thread. :D

peep inside the cerebralised saucepan.