I like using commas-I just also happen to like sleeping with them, what's wrong with that?" were the first words of Tomas Tragiducinski's now infamous interview with Time Magazine. "I just happen to also love periods, semicolons, hashes, dashes, carrots, and asterisks!" is how he followed.
Mr. Tragiducinski, a veritable ladies man of punctuation, is one of the few punctuation polygamists still leaving in Western Europe. Once a proud and irreverent breed the so-called PolyP's no longer inhabit the same level of public attention and social prosperity they did in the mid 80's.
In the words of Mr. Tragiducinski himself, "sure we still do well with the 'marks' but as for our other ambitions, I guess we've put them back on the bookshelves."
The group that very nearly overthrew Fran??ois Mitterand's 5th Republic is now reduced to picking up their 'marks' in the filthy red light districts of the European cities that they once called their breeding grounds.
This whole topic of conversation has been dusted off once again due to the aforementioned prophet of everything PolyP's shocking arrest in Lichtenstein last week on charges of rape (forced exclamation) and assault with a deadly asterisk. These very serious charges, only existent in the Lichtensteinean charters and Baruch Spinoza's imagination, have rehased the age-old debate about the morality of the PolyP lifestyle.
"It's disgusting, absolutely disgusting-men having sex with punctuation" were the infamous words of the former republican senator Trent Lott taken completely out of context that ironically led to the spread of the lifestyle in the US. This quotation also kick started scientific enquiries into the human's sexual attraction to grammatical entities (this paved the way for the hugely influential Dodge, Spring et al study (1980) which concluded that the letter 'a' is by far the most enticing in the English language-the Danes preferred the '??', the Germans the 'bratwurst') and begged questions about whether it was a biological problem or purely a question of choice.
While many of these questions still remained unresolved, Tragiducinski's trial certainly is not. The evidence against him is expansive (rumors abound that the evidence locker for this case is housed in near-by Germany because it is larger than the country itself-I find this claim to be ridiculous, personally). His own testimony, due to his PolyP pride, promises to riddle with self incrimination. An exert of his affidavit to the police is reproduced below
T: I made that semicolon mine.
Police: You "made her"?
T: I took her right up off the page and showed her who her editor was-it was me. I do what I want to everything. I took her and bent her over a couple of dashes I picked up earlier that night, and oh boy did they like it when the exclamation mark went in for the kill.
Police: So you made her!
T: That's what I said, isn't it!
As one can most likely see, Tragiducinski's incredible ...enthusiasm, and lack of sentence comprehension, seems to have led him and his fellow PolyP's astray.
However, it hasn't stopped me!
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:-
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~ : - (double team)
Ah...
