On his website, Trevor Buttworth has posted his treatise on the macho prejudice against the much maligned semi-colon.

"It's true that American writers tend to scorn and spurn the semicolon," says James Wolcott, Vanity Fair's artfully acerbic critic. "But those with more Anglophile tastes in literature and journalism, such as Gore Vidal or the editors of The New Yorker under William Shawn, sprinkled it liberally. It may be a fear of being thought pretentious, even poncy. The semicolon adds a note of formality, and informality has been all the rage for decades. 'Real' writing is butch and cinematic, so emphatic and declarative that it has no need of these rest stops or hinges between phrases."

And yet at the same time it's hard to find anyone who doesn't admire Gore Vidal's prose, or crave to work at The New Yorker. Mention Anthony Lane, the magazine's film critic, at any gathering of younger American writers and there's a collective swoon, as if Elvis's hips had suddenly taken on textual form. When, at one such gathering, I mentioned that Lane was something of a semicolonist, one journalist said her editor excised every single semicolon she attempted to smuggle into her prose.

It's true! There seems to be much disdain for the semi-colon. I read somewhere that Kurt Vonnegut called them "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Donald Barthelme said they were as "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." Apparently, the "real men" of writing don't use semi-colons. Hm. I'm probably going to go through all my Raymond Chandler books to see if he ever used one (though I doubt it). Does anyone remember if Ernest Hemingway ever used a semi-colon?

I could argue that Truman Capote might have used them several times, but I'm not sure that's going to help the semi-colon's case.

So recently, someone told me that the German language has words for the day before yesterday - vorgenstern - and the day after tomorrow - ubermorgen. Come to think of it, it is strange that not every language does. This reminded me of German words I had been told about before. Words like kummerspeck, which literally translated means 'grief bacon', referring to the weight gained from emotional overeating, and drachenfutter, literally translated as 'dragon fodder', which is what you call gifts and peace offerings husbands give to angry wives.

Just today, I learned about the word nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss 'making up for kisses that have been omitted'. Isn't that lovely? I'm starting to think of taking up some lessons now just to see if they actually do have a word for everything.

edit 09:55 pm: I have just been told that the Germans also have a saying that goes: A kiss without a bread is like an egg without salt. Heehee. Hmmmm. Anybody care to weigh in on this?