The Mysterious Colon

Henri Bensussen, The Maven

Maven reflecting on her over-dependence on the colon to keep her sentences from ending when they should, always thinking of one more dependent clause to add to all the others, because you, but especially she, never knows what might happen in a future time we cannot yet imagine.
​

If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.       —Alice Oswald

​Read more at: BrainyQuote.com

The Maven Explains the Love Life of the Mysterious Colon, sort of:

The important little punctuation mark known as “colon” is one The Maven can relate to. She thinks of it as a spill-over of thought after a sentence is finished: instead of the plain dot of a period, a colon is two stacked periods. It’s the phrase or thought that wants to hang onto what went before rather than letting go and forming its own sentence: a caboose. She thinks of two linked ideas, intimate as lovers, wanting to hug one another beyond the limit of one dot.

Put another way, when a subject is so relevant to the previous sentence that the Maven wants to include this extra idea, she uses the colon to tie it tightly to what came before: a symbolic little fence between the two. Stretching the concept of intimacy further, a colon is like conjoined fraternal twins: impossible in biology, but not in literature.
The tacked-on idea following a colon can be in the form of a series of phrases separated by semi-colons, that is, a list, and it might be only a word or two, often an ironic comment on the thought that precedes it.
​
Wikipedia sums it up this way: A colon precedes an explanation, or an enumeration, or list. Suitable uses for colons: with ratios, titles and subtitles of books; city and publisher in bibliographies; Biblical citations between chapter and verse; in American English to separate hours and minutes; and for business letter salutations.

​
To see the full explanation go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colon and note how the colon sets off https from //, which is also useful in emoticons :).
​

Click on "Comments" above or below the post, then fill in the form, or click on "Reply" of another comment to add to that comment. 

SHARE on your Facebook or Twitter, hit the buttons: