Tuesday, April 18, 2006

post 252. has something changed? or have i always been wrong?

now, i loves me some compound sentences. and i mean com-pound. so i'm very friendly with semicolons, commas, dashes, and have had a long and loving relationship with parenthesis. but something, over the past few years, has changed my attitude toward the parenthesis. es. parenthesises. parentheses? anyway. i've always, since a wee lad, written like this:

...and now, i've got this talking dinosaur in my back yard (named "henry," no less).

but lately i've noticed that in real people's writing -- such as books and magazines -- my sentence would be structured like this:

...and now, i've got this talking dinosaur in my back yard. (named "henry," no less.)

have i been wrong all these years? or am i simply experiencing some evolution of the written language?