Colonoscopy:

Unfake News: The colon is quickly falling out of favor and some linguists believe it will be all but extinct by 2050 or so. To geeks like me, this is very unfortunate, given the rich, bloody, confusing history of the mark. The “modern” use and construction of the colon, as we know it, was used most notably by the writer and philosopher, Aristophanes in about 300 BC. He (then everyone else) used it mostly to mark the end of a complete thought, which is to be followed by another, related one. This is different from the “period” as the latter indicated (and still does) a “full stop,” i.e .; the end of the complete thought. So, in the time of Aristophanes, one might have written: (see what I did there?) I love my wife: And I love my meatloaf sandwich. The colon signaled that, while the thought about loving my wife is complete and stands alone, to follow is going to be a somewhat related point about my feelings about meatloaf.

This usage eventually, fascinatingly, gave way to using the colon as a signal that a litanization is coming. A list. A roster. An itemization. By the time I was learning grammar and punctuation via the Funk & Wagnalls book in the 1970s, the primary way to remember when to use a colon was “when compiling a list or making an announcement.” For example: (see what I did there again? I’m about to give you a “list” of examples; or I’m about to “announce” an example: (See, I did it again!)

Things to do before the end of the day:

Rinse coffee cup

Tease the dog

Annoy wife

Pop zits

Shovel snow

Or:

I’m about to make an important announcement:

Announcing stuff makes it seem important.

This use is interesting because, prior to Aristophanes, the colon was used very similarly, that is, to establish that an important litanization or listing was about to be written or an announcement about to be made — this is the genesis of why we use a colon at the beginning of a formal letter after the recipient’s name:

Dear John:

I’ve fallen in love with your best friend and am impregnated by him. Have fun fighting the war.

-Bonnie

The “bloody” reference is due to the way the colon literally got formed — most say by a Druidic cult leader/priest/whatever — sometime in the fifth century B.C. These peoples were surprisingly literate. Sort of like Native American and Amazonian tribes, there was not a lot of use for a written language, but they were prolific with their respective symbology. Anyway, one leader, a Gandalf-like character, famously posted a note on a tree at the center of their ritualistic sacrifice site (church). On it were listed the “sins” that were unacceptable to their community — pretty much a Moses and Ten Commandments-type thing. The document was titled: “Sins” using their symbology — more specifically, it noted “Sins Punishable by Death.” To punctuate the point, the phrase was followed by two bloody thumb-prints, one above the other, the first colon:

There you go. Something you NEVER needed to know.

… I’ll tell you about semicolons another time; until then, take care. (See what I did there?)

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet-based author and marketing executive. Winner of a Minnesota Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest “Columnist of the Year” award in 2017, his book “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local booksellers, the Pine Knot News office and at killingthedevil.com.