Junto Boys

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If you appreciate the semicolon -- and who doesn't? -- then this article's for you, about the impeccable use of one on a New York subway placard.

This was a witty line:

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

How to properly use a semicolon is a rule of English that I felt I never mastered. I have a very short list of memories from my senior year of high school, and one of them is pondering the markup of my English test on semicolons, which the record says I botched but I never quite agreed. In any event, the use of the semicolon is no longer taught as important, so that particular bit of ignorance has apparently become less limiting. What a relief; I can relax.