not for the joke it isn't; i am not, in fact, thinking of the racial slur; we all have google (but not all of us will idly assume to know the etymology of a project's name based on this); semicolons are awful punctuation
Hey now, wait a minute. We can argue all day about kefir, kafir, and kaffir, but don't you impinge on the dignity of the semicolon just because the previous poster used one incorrectly.
I don’t think it’s an incorrect use of the semicolon. Semicolons are out of fashion these days, but using a semicolon to join two related clauses is perfectly fine, as far as semicolon usage goes.
But the verb in the second clause is not the elided verb in the first clause, so it is not linking in that fashion. The two clauses are independent of each other.
It's debatable, but they could be linked by [You're thinking of] wrong root word.
I agree that if you think "Wrong root word. You're thinking of Kafir." is acceptable, so too would be the semicolon usage, which is why I said "arguably incorrect" rather than just "incorrect"
"[That is the] wrong root word; You're thinking of Kafir".
Since in the first clause, it seems like the intention is to point to the previous comment that is the matter at hand, which was actually written not just thought about. However, other readings might be possible.
I don't see the wrong usage there, assuming that "Wrong root word. You're thinking of kaffir." would have been correct. Which it seems to be the case to me since both "Wrong root word." and "You're thinking of kaffir." seem to be correct sentences and juxtaposition is OK as well.
Who said anything about "racial slur"s? In Urdu, one of the languages I speak, "kaffir" means "non-believer". Your suggestions 'mushrik' and 'neocon' seemed to fit pretty perfectly with that interpretation.
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Aside: semicolons are pretty great once one learns to wield them. Try it; you'll like it. Just think of it as a shorter pause than a period, but longer than a comma.
the typical romanization of arabic كافر is "kafir". the typical spelling of the slur associated with apartheid-era south africa is "kaffir".
> one of the languages I speak
why would i care which languages you speak
you are not me
i am not you
neither of us are everyone else
>try it
perhaps instead of me doing any of that, you could simply stop arrogating reflexively in your internet comments and presuming to know the inner contents of others' minds (you do not)
>semicolons
the purpose of your original reply was to condescend in typical nerdsplaining fashion. the reason my reply to you, in turn, was written like it was, including the side mention of semicolons, was to escalate abruptly and unambiguously, such that there was no ambiguity as to what i thought of the situation. i was expressing contempt. it's merely a circumstantial convenience that semicolons do happen to be dogshit punctuation used as epistemic crutch notation in prose
