sad and true, cog! which is why my standard advice re the use of a thesaurus is to lock it up till it's not needed...
One of my pet peeves [1] is when people confuse semantics with grammar, but of course that's a semantic peeve, not a grammatical peeve. [1] Not really, just teasing.
I thought he was talking about the sentences in Charlotte Macleod's books - the ones that have commas instead of semicolons. That's right, and I'll stand by my own nitpickiness, 'style' or not, but sentence fragments in dialogue aren't exactly the same thing. Chickenfreak's sentence was fine. Sorry, I haven't figured out how to use the 'quote' function on this forum yet.
There are basically two ways to do it. The first one is not very intuitive, sadly. If you want to quote a person's post as I've just done with yours, all you need to do is hit the 'reply' prompt underneath their post. (Not, oddly, the 'quote' prompt.) The entire post plus the person's name will then appear at the top of a new space below, next to your own avatar. Note, at this stage the quote will NOT appear in blue. Once you've written your bit and pressed 'post reply' then the person's quote will appear beside your avatar in blue. You can edit out the parts of the quote you don't want to include, but make sure you leave the start and end brackets in place. Otherwise, copy and paste anything you want to quote into a new 'reply' space next to your avatar. Highlight the piece you want to quote and then choose the quote (❞) icon up on the edit bar next to your avatar. (It's the icon between the "code" icon and the "drafts icon, 4th from the end.) Again, it this quote will not appear in blue until you post your reply. This quote will not be attributed to anyone, unlike the first method, so you'll need to explain who said it. Hope this helps.
