Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location.

I love today’s New York Times article about a fussy copywriter who introduced a colon where no one expected it.  In punctuation there is both style and substance.

The trouble is that once you start talking about punctuation, someone is bound to find flaws and pick holes in your work. 

The canonical work on punctuation is Eats Shoots and Leaves.  The New Yorker review of the book begins:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there.