Whatever happened to the colon-dash punctuation mark. You remember the thing:
:-
It seems to have gone the way of bowler hats, Texan bars and white dog poo.
When I was a kid, we were taught that we should always introduce a list with a colon followed by a dash. But nowadays, all you ever see is colons. Granted, the colons look a lot tidier without the dashes, but I wonder who it was who decided that the dash was no longer necessary. Perhaps they thought it looked a bit too much like one of those godawful smilies. A smiley without a smile.
I seem to be spending far too much time worrying about this sort of thing these days.
The colon-dash, eh? Sounds like some sort of sponsored charity event in a hospital.
It is on permanent loan to the Cerne Abbas giant!
IT'S A 3 PIN PLUG.
Did anyone ever disprove our schooldays' insistence that white dog poo emanated from white dogs?
Come to think of it, you don't see white dogs these days either, so your crackpot schoolboy theory might have legs.