Interesting topic. For people who speak in short sentences, colons and semi-colons are probably not much of an issue. I know I've written a couple of sentences in Mudcat discussions that I've suggested people not try to diagram; those are the sentences that need semi-colons. For more information (and some pretty good examples) you might want to find the Harbrace College Handbook . Hardest class I ever took at the university was History and Development of the English Language. You'd think it would be easy, a class about your first language, right? Au contraire!

I like your post, Don. It's an excellent example of how complicated our grammar is today, when we now choose to add html to it.

SRS