I remember our Literature 12 teacher Mr. Jim Satterthwaite screaming at us over our misuse of the semi-colon. "Don't even go near it!" he said (screamed). "Not until you understand it -- what it is, what it does, and why, when you don't use it properly, it makes you look pretentious!" Then he picked up a copy of Strunk and White' s The Elements of Style (1959) and read to us what it was that we weren't doing.
Of Strunk's rules of usage, the one that impressed me most was his suggestion that for shorter (independent) clauses we forgo the semi-colon for the comma. I still hold to this. So imagine how I felt a few years ago when TL;DR entered the lexicon.
Too long; didn't read is immune to Strunk's suggestion, leading me to think that people like this barbed thing, this "tick on a dog's belly" as Donald Barthelme once described it. So rather than argue over it, I suggest a variant on TL;DR: NLE;HTRT:
Not long enough; had to read twice.
But even here Strunk would suggest a comma, no?
Mr. Satterthwaite? Are you still out there?
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