On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 10:40 PM, Alex Smith <ais...@alumni.bham.ac.uk> wrote: > I'd say that your first two sentences are both effectively quoting the > end of the sentence; «I disagree on this point, and the reason is > "colons aren't always used for quotation"». The third is ambiguous > between the meaning you intended, and what to me is a more reasonable > meaning outside context, «H. Arbitor said "perhaps this discussion > should be part of the record?"». It's also worth noting that it's a > fairly tortured use of punctuation in all three sentences; the first > would be more naturally written with a semicolon, the latter two with > commas.
My impression is that even specifically in Agora, using colons to address people is fairly common. As for tortured: perhaps, but I do use colons pretty often even when I'm not trying to make a point. :) Indeed, too often. > Imagine the following: > >> I do not do the following: >> I call a CFJ on … > > That seems identical grammatically to your "Well then:" example, and > yet I can't imagine it actually calling a CFJ. I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree that "I do not do the following" is grammatically similar to "Well then". Going back to your programming analogy, "I do not do the following" feels like it *should* take a quote, or at least a lambda, whereas "Well then" is more like a block, in the C sense. And after all, in C-family languages, if we comment out the statement (if, while, etc.) introducing a block, the result is to perform the block once, unconditionally. Since uninterpretable text in Agora is effectively commented out, shouldn't we do the same? :) Well, maybe that's taking the analogy a little too far.
