The distinction between the two sentences from Nunberg that Bob Yates notes
do exemplify the kind of very fine distinctions that punctuation can make.
My question would be, however, if you gave these two sentences to 100 people
in a furniture store who were not teachers of English, how many of them
would be able to articulate the difference? In practical terms, would it
change their understanding of the sentence's meaning? If a store opted to
use the semi-colon, would the customers understand they were being
commanded? If that same company decided to charge a storage fee to all of
its customers who ordered on Monday but failed to pick up on Tuesday, would
the customers or courts accept the argument that the company's signs had a
semi-colon and therefore implied a command?  And finally, isn't that
distinction still based primarily on the fact we chose to believe that is
what those pieces of punctuation mean? If 95% of the population believe the
two sentences are alike in meaning and live and work and buy furniture and
live happily under this belief, are they still wrong? Everything about
language changes over time - it isn't, for me anyway, necessarily a question
of what is right or wrong, but of what is meaningful or - well -
"unmeaningful."


Maureen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor, English
Johnson County Community College

------------
  1.  Order your furniture on Monday, take it home on Tuesday.
  2.  Order your furniture on Monday; take it home on Tuesday.

(1) suggests ordering furniture is a condition for taking it home.  (2)
shows that
ordering and taking it home are two separate commands.

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