semicolon, deft, exhortation, resilience

The lengthy report — it exceeded 14,000 Chinese characters — was steeped in the almost indecipherable language used by Communist Party officials and filled with paeans to the important guidance of Xi Jinping, the country’s president and head of the Communist Party. It also included an exhortation to study a work of Chairman Mao Zedong called “The Working Methods of Party Committees.” Mao, who died in 1976, was the first leader of the People’s Republic of China.


在這份篇幅超過1.4萬字的冗長報告中，充斥着共產黨官員使用的那種幾乎無法理解的語言，處處在頌揚國家主席和共產黨領導人習近平的重要領導。文章還敦促相關人員學習毛澤東主席的《黨委會的工作方法》。於1976年去世的毛澤東是中國的第一任領導人。




第 105 頁
Get the facts! Is there any meaning to this exhortation? Communication and negotiation (as between customer and supplier, between management and union, ...




the New York Times describes it as a mixture of acknowledging the seriousness of the economic problems "with a Reaganesque exhortation to American resilience."

Wikipedia article "Semicolon".

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

Cary Conover for The New York Times

Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon.

紐約市地鐵的分號大師


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By SAM ROBERTS

Published: February 18, 2008

Correction Appended
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.
One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)
But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.
People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.
Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”
Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.
Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”
Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”
The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”
New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.
The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

Racial Barrier Falls,  Call for Change, reformist, exhortation

OBAMA
Racial Barrier Falls as Voters Embrace Call for Change

Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls

Obama Makes History
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was elected the nation's 44th president yesterday, riding a reformist message of change and an inspirational exhortation of hope to become the first African American to ascend to the White House.
(By Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post)



exhort
verb [T + to infinitive] FORMAL 勸告、勸勉、敦促
to strongly encourage or try to persuade someone to do something:
The governor exhorted the prisoners not to riot.

exhortation
noun [C or U] FORMAL
Despite the exhortations of the union leaders the workers voted to strike.
The book is essentially an exhortation to religious tolerance.

exhortation

(ĕg'zôr-tā'shən, ĕk'sôr-) 
n.

1. The act or an instance of exhorting.
2. A speech or discourse that encourages, incites, or earnestly advises.

ex・hort

  

━━ vt. 熱心に勧める; 勧告［訓戒］する.
 ex・hor・ta・tion　━━ n.
 ex・hor・ta・tive, ex・hort・a・to・ry　━━ a.

deft Show phonetics
adjective
skilful, clever or quick:

Her movements were deft and quick.
She answered the journalist's questions with a deft touch.
He's very deft at handling awkward situations.
adjective

1. Showing art or skill in performing or doing: adroit, artful, dexterous, skillful.
2. Exhibiting or possessing skill and ease in performance: adroit, clever, dexterous, facile, handy, nimble, slick.
3. Well done or executed: adroit, clean, neat, skillful.

deftly
adverb
He deftly (= skilfully) caught the ball.

deftness 
noun [U]



resilient
adjective
able to quickly return to a previous good condition:
This rubber ball is very resilient and immediately springs back into shape.
She's a resilient girl - she won't be unhappy for long.

resilience noun [U] (FORMAL resiliency)