Many times, Mr. Rochester sends me emails with words I recognize, aeropsace, lift, envelope, heat analysis, and ratio, but when he weaves them together it looks less like a sweater and more like something I would knit, a meaningless blob of yarn. It is rare that I send him an email containing contents that he finds unreadable.
Today, dear Readers, I succeeded in stumping the engineer. After asking for some comma and semi-colon advice, I repaired his sentence and the following exchange occurred:
Jane: No, you need to replace the semi-colon with a colon. A semi-colon acts as a conjunction of two complete clauses and a colon acts as a conjunction of incomplete clauses, usually indicating that an explanation, list, or series is to follow.
Mr. Rochester: Colon, got it. All the rest of what you said came out like blah, blah, blah.
Jane: Haha. I stumped the engineer!
Mr. Rochester: That’s not hard. Words are like kryptonite to engineers.
Sage words of wisdom: Next time you are confronted with a room of dangerous engineers, simply began to ask them questions of grammar and literature until they become weak and you can overcome them.
–Jane, laughs maniacally
In my hilarity, I had some typos to correct. Pardon if you recieved a typoed version.Â