His and Hers: Eat, shoot, and get out of here
His and Hers is a weekly discussion of a question or topic relating to marriage. On Friday, my wife and I each write our thoughts on the week's topic. I invite others to do the same with their spouses as an exercise in celebrating marriage. This week's question is:
If you were a punctuation mark, what would you be? Why?
Disclaimer: Mrs. Happy crashes around 7:00 p.m. nowadays and can't think well enough to write anything. I asked her the question above, and she said, "A semicolon." At least I think that's what she said. Her speech was slurred and her eyes were barely open. I asked her why the semicolon, and she waved me off and told me to write something myself, so I wrote the following response on her behalf. I have really never been able to grasp the proper use of the semicolon, so the explanation is a bit jumbled. I showed it to her to get her approval, but in her sleepy grumpiness she said, "You didn't even make me sound like a real person." I'm not sure what that means. Early in our marriage she was in this same state of sleepiness and believed herself to be a can of soup. Make of that what you will. —Curt
Mrs. Happy's response
I would be a semicolon. It is a rare and beautiful piece of punctuation that makes people stop and think before moving on. It is the fulcrum upon which one hand is balanced against the other. It possesses a graceful ambiguity that offers elegance and poetry to anyone who understands it while producing confusion and frustration for anyone who doesn't.
Curt's marriage proposal sparkled with a creativity born either of genius or madness; such a fine line separates the two, it is sometimes hard to tell which is which.
Curt's response
William Zinsser said of the dash: "Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper—a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English." Bumpkins surely regard it as pretentious, giving the poor thing nowhere to really fit in. In practice, the dash interrupts the sentence at hand with loosely related, entirely unnecessary, but usually beneficial information. It can also signify either a sharp divergence or an important clarification of thought—sometimes both. I guess that's me.
