Last year I was reading a "grammar" book by Lynn Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves. In it she humorously explains a brief history of english typography including the apostrophe, comma, period, colon, and semicolon. Consider that once upon a time none of these notations existed. Early tellings of the bible had not even spaces between words. Hard to imagine, but there you have it.
I remembered reading the following passage, to which I scan on this here blog directly:
An entire book without a single semicolon? A mundane factoid at best. Who cares, right? Now it just so happens I'm reading Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
While enjoying the story and not even thinking about the above quote, on page 202 I stumbled across this paragraph:
What's that thing there on the fifth line? Oh my god, a SEMICOLON!
Come on Lynn, were you just joking around or did you not a) check your "academic" source or b) read the book? Is being apocryphal the same as plain false? I dunno...
Here's the best part: Googling this gaffe has led me to others quoting Lynn's claim. See here and here, for instance.
Moral of the story: when you do some homework it's funnier for everyone. When you don't, it's just funny for me, I guess.
