Posted by Robert Hill on May 13, 1999 at 11:16:05 from proxy2.leeds.ac.uk:
In Reply to: Re: Then, it happened... posted by John Richardson on May 13, 1999 at 00:04:07:
When reading the books I occasionally notice what I might regard as
"lapses of style" (to use John Richardson's phrase), though no specific
examples spring to mind just now. I would not regard the colon
example as one.
The reference is to the leading lights in the harbour on Wild Cat
Island, when they are first put up experimentally at dusk (in a
chapter called Leading Lights, if I remember correctly). The phrase
runs something like this:
"... like the stop called a colon, which I am just about
to make: there, like that."
It has never occurred to me that this explanation might be regarded
as "rude". It might be called clever, in the sense that the colon is
gramatically appropriate at the point in the sentence where it's used.