Today's Word—Trafficking in Semi-colons

Punctuating New York

“In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a ‘New York sentence.’ In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.”
—Sam Roberts, reporter, The New York Times, in a story about semicolons in the subway
(Click here to see story.) (Thanks to alert and literate WORDster Tom Hodges)

On This Day . . .
. . . In 2003, Mission Accomplished! President George W. Bush landed a Navy fighter on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared major combat in Iraq over.
. . . In 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a U.S. spy plane and captured pilot Gary S. Powers.
. . . In 1707, the Kingdom of Great Britain was created by merging England and Scotland.
. . . In 1941, Orson Welles’s new film “Citizen Kane” premiered in New York.
. . . In 1967, Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in Las Vegas.

Birthdays:
83 . . . Chuck Bednarik, football player
69 . . . Judy Collins, singer
57 . . . Dann Florek, actor (“Law and Order: SUV”)
Kate Smith (1907-1986), singer
Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), English general; defeated Napoleon at Waterloo (1815)
Jose Alencar (1829-1877), Brazilian journalist, novelist and playwright
Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), American labor organizer known as “Mother Jones”