Ode to the ;
Punctuation matters
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I’m angry; the semicolon deserves better.
A well-known, well-meaning, advanced-thinking AI prognosticator addressed today’s ON_Discourse Breakfast Club with a provocation about school; surprisingly, it sparked a day-long argument about the utility of the semicolon; the argument is still happening right now, late into the evening.
You’re going to get angry too; I am about to repeat the provocation.
“I was speaking in front of an audience of 700 educators, telling them to stop teaching kids how to use a semicolon.”
I can understand the impulse; grammar policing is an irritating source of friction in the writing process; it imposes seemingly unnecessary rules on a mode of communication; everybody hates a grammar snob.
But this is shallow thinking; it disregards the role structure plays in language; it reduces the challenges of learning into an avoidable inconvenience; it mistakes difficulty for waste; it strips format out of writing and calls it progress.
I’m so riled up; I’m going to channel these feelings into my own provocation.
PROVOCATION OF THE WEEK
Punctuation matters.
Many people in the group defended the semicolon; I don’t think it was a literal defense of a mark; I think the conversation turned it into an artifact of culture we don’t want to discard.
“You think the semicolon is a symbol of our culture?”
I’m paraphrasing the response to our pushback; this was a two-sided debate; you might call it an engaged discourse.
There is an irony at the heart of this entire argument; another punctuation mark is literally the defining symbol of the AI era; it dominates the generated prose that floods our collective screens; it punctuates the familiar grammatical rhythm of LLM output; the rise of this mark coincides with the demise of the semicolon; it represents the brain-rot slop we all love to hate; if you think punctuation is not culture, you are missing the mark.
The punctuation mark of this era — it’s the em-dash.
What’s Next
If you have thoughts, feedback, or a perspective worth sharing, reach out: chmiel@ondiscourse.com. You might see your reaction in next week’s edition.
ON_Member Events
ON_Discourse Group Chat for AI Leaders: Does Frontier AI Have the Wrong Business Model?Wednesday, May 27, 5-8pm ET
Barry Wacksman, former Vice Chairman and Global Chief Strategy Officer at R/GA for 21 years, and is now Chairman and Co-Founder at Proto, an innovation company, recently made the argument that frontier AI labs are repeating the agency mistake of the 90s: creating massive value, capturing almost none of it. OpenAI has raised $186B but runs at a $14B loss. If the labs can't price invention, who captures the upside, the application layer, the services companies, or the industries being transformed?
ON_Discourse Speakeasy: Monthly Cocktails for AI leaders
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