Semicolon mandatory starting Monday: conversations rejected without a punctuation ticket

After a night of metaphorical deliberations, the Official Semicolon Office is imposing Civic Breathing for sentences.
On the agenda: conversation permits, café inspections, and confiscation of words due to uncontrolled oratorical momentum.

In a statement written in alexandrines and then cut off abruptly halfway through, the Official Semicolon Office (OOPV) announced the introduction of a Charter of the Spoken Pause. Any sentence of more than seven words must include an audible semicolon, materialized by a brief silence with a distant gaze. Brigades of Responsible Listening will circulate on café terraces to verify grammatical ventilation; offenders will have a random word removed, immediately and without appeal, until further breathing notice.

Lines are already forming in front of the Punctuation Counters: they’re handing out manuals on sighing, biodegradable comma kits, and emergency dashes for late-day conversations. Booksellers, promoted to breathing coaches, are organizing “Frank Silence and a Crisp Semicolon” workshops where people learn to look at the ceiling with dignity while leaving their sentence hanging. In some bakeries, the traditional “Will that be all?” has become “Will that be all; or almost?” to avoid syntactic seals.

“It’s not about forbidding, but about inserting; not about restricting, but about spacing; society needs grammatical oxygen,” is said to have declared Paulette Signe, acting deputy director general in a permanent capacity of the OOPV, before marking an exemplary pause of three and a half seconds. “Our teams will provide sigh masks and reflective vests for nocturnal hesitations.” She specifies that every business must display its “Quota of Tamed Silence” next to its opening hours, on pain of being condemned to speak in footnotes for a week.

The penalties promise to be creative: removal of the word “thing” for repeat offenses, the obligation to end every sentence with “to be continued” at large meals, and, for inveterate chatterboxes, a reeducation course at the Center for Constructive Doubt. The Friendly Society of Useless Parentheses is already calling for a giant syntactic nap on Saturday, asking for “calm, calm; and quotation marks for everyone.” As for the black market, it is organizing: word has it that at the back of apartment hallways, smugglers are selling undeclared commas—by the pack of ten, shrink-wrapped, with a punctuation ticket included.