Shadi Mirza this was a great post, and the “angry” commenter added to the tongue-in-cheek nature of this post.

Language is truly fluid and changing. HG Wells wrote in a very different time when language prowess was like sexual power.

What I see in Wells is what I saw all the time when I was studying German language and linquistics. In the original German, Death in Venice my Thomas Mann, is considered as having the longest sentence ever written (which also opens the book).

German is linguistically different from English as it’s a Subject — Object — Verb structure (English is SVO), and the grammar allows you to bracket thoughts with contractions. It’s far more complex in this way than the use of the English semicolon. In the case of Death in Venice, the first clause of the first sentence is the “opening bracket” that surrounds a 3/4 page length sentence, with the original verb coming at the end of this longest ever sentence.

It really depends on one’s purpose in writing. Here on Medium, and other places online, my sentence above might be considered too long.

If I were to write a book and I only cared for playing with grammar and syntax, not about profits and likes, then I could fuck your mind with semicolons.

But there ain’t none in this comment, because honestly, I’d have to think too hard if I was doing it right!

:-)