Today’s tea was Japanese Sencha. It’s an elegant green tea that we associate with our Gran because her default teabag green was a sencha. Aromatic and crisp, it’s a tea-like tea. Brew it hot and it tastes lovely. Let it steep too long and it goes bitter. We always pour sencha a bit early to dodge that particular problem.
Otherwise it was a slow day, and in the course of skiving off work we stumbled onto an article about the dying art of the semicolon; Apparently no one uses them any more. It felt a tad overegged; As per the article Virginia Wolfe was the last person of note to use a semicolon. We grant that no one else wants to wrap sentences around whole classrooms these days, but we can think of writers that still have a use for them.
They’re definitely few and far between, though. We happen to quite like them as a piece of punctuation because you can add a lot of what our dance teacher calls light and shade to a sentence. Not so anyone else. Ah well, we always were old fashioned. Of course, this article goes on to say that we’re all using Em-dashes right and left and we’re not sure we agree with that, either. Or maybe we read the wrong books. But the last time we saw anyone commit to the Em-Dash with zest it was L. M. Montgomery and she was being accused of purple prose.
We love her, too, we hasten to add.
Green tea and musings on punctuation. You can see the kind of exciting life we lead. Here’s a poem to go with all this nonsense by a Poetry and Cake favourite, no less.
Twould Be Nice To Be An Apostrophe
Roger McGough
twould be nice to be
an apostrophe
floating above an s
hovering like a paper kite
in between the its
eavesdropping, tiptoeing
high above the thats
an inky comet
spiralling
the highest tossed
of hats
We first discovered this gem listening to a podcast on grammar, and thereafter supposed we’d misremembered it because Googling the first line availed us nothing. We got a bit of a shock when we saw the author, we can tell you! For someone that well-known the internet played properly coy with the composition.
Chorister at Home 