From this New York Times story on proper use of a semicolon in subway signage:
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.)
Part of me thinks Sam Roberts wrote the entire story just to get that last line in. I know I would.
I'm Anil Dash, and I've been blogging here since 1999, writing about how culture is made. Contact me at anil@dashes.com, at +1 646 833 8659, or at anildash on Twitter or IM. Find out more »
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It reminds me of a story that Malcolm Gladwell (from the Washington Post) told at The Moth regarding a competition that he participated in. The goal was to see who could get the phrase "rasies new and troubling questions" into the paper the most over the course of one month.
At the end of the month, they had a championship round, trying to get the phrase "peverse and often baffling" into a story.
Richard Speck, the mass-murderer, was killed in prison during a fight that started after he made a sexually suggestive remark to another inmate. Supposedly the hed in the Chicago paper the next morning was "Speck Ends Sentence With Proposition."