On 2012-03-19, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:26:10 +0000, Neil Cerutti wrote: > [...] >>> *A major style guide for general American writing and >>> publication: used by some as the 'Bible'. >> >> Thanks for the discussion and corrections. My apologies to >> Steven for pushing my apparnetly overly narrow view. There are >> plenty of valid use cases for a colon without an independent >> clause. > > No apology necessary, I like a good argument :) > > http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/sketch.htm > > One observation that amuses me though... it seems to me that > the widespread practice of people writing colons following > sentence fragments isn't sufficient to convince you that this > is grammatical, but a self- declared authority prescribing it > as allowed is. That makes you a grammar prescriptivist :)
There are certain uses of colon that are worse than others, in my mind. It's a matter of taste, and that's going to be impossible to find references for. My birthday cake had three kinds of frosting: chocolate, vanilla and raspberry. I checked only one reference before diving in (www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/), but it's a guide that concentrates on presenting yourself well through widely acceptable grammar. It's not an exhaustive taxonomy of all valid usages. So I looked in the wrong place. I still think sentence fragments before a colon introducing a list often looks bad, and may be taken for an error. But it doesn't always look bad, and I didn't think about it enough. > We're-all-a-little-bit-prescriptivists-when-it-comes-to-grammar-ly y'rs, Yep: my clever usage is another's abomination. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
