This is how it happened: I was listening to an interview Tim Ferris did with Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org, and in passing they referred to “the semi-colon” quote by Kurt Vonnegut, in the context of a conversation Tim Ferris had with a friend who has a semi-colon tattooed on his forearm. It was all very in-passing, but who isn’t curious about semi-colons? I googled “semi-colon quote,” and discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s, which I found offensive and dated–back to those good old days certain folks on both the left and the right are holding up as golden, when *they* felt free to sound like reactionary jerks, when there were no intellectual consequences for idiotic behavior because they lived in a bubble that approved whatever they did no matter how stupid. (If you feel compelled to follow that link, you can then check out Aya’s response of the Daily Dose.)

But the other quotes that came up introduced me to The Semi-colon Project:

This moves me because we are at a semi-colon moment in history. It was 109 degrees yesterday where I live in Northern California, the air full of smoke, new fires sparking. Carolyn Forche writes, “It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.” 

When Tim mentioned his friend’s tattoo, Maria laughed and made a fond comment about type nerds (and clearly, I’m one of them). But as I looked around, it became clear that the semicolon as body art is about much more than typeset. A semicolon is a tool, an option, a way forward when something seems about to end, a beat for a breath, a new subject, a new verb, a new direct object. People who tell you that the words we use and the ways we punctuate them don’t matter–until people stop listening to them, stop valuing their claptrap–are waging a different war from the one we need to be fighting. We who have been excluded are not now crowding into your sentence; we are not looking for a parenthetical acknowledgment; we are building forward. A new subject, a new verb, heading for a new direct object. We are not going to let a lack of imagination or action, a lack of courage, or a wall of ignorance bring the sentence that is this planet to an end.

And now, a counter-claim from ee cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis