Reporters for Yahoo! News love semicolons in headlines, but don’t quite understand the punctuation mark. For some reason, they feel it’s the same as a period and capitalize the word following a semi; this time the error occurs on the blog ”The Ticket”:
The niceties of punctuation continue to elude the writer when it comes to forming a possessive. Just how many nations sent governors to Washington? I thought it was just one, but the apostrophe following the letter S in nations indicates otherwise. There were at least two countries involved. Yeah, that’s “The Ticket.”
February 28, 2011 at 9:23 am
Ah, the semicolon; it does add an air of brilliance. Aargh, if Yahoo! news begins using the semicolon, I will just scream.
February 28, 2011 at 3:11 pm
What is so difficult about understanding that a semicolon isn’t a period? Period.