Yeah, that semi-colon is a full sentence break. It’s an abuse to consider it a single sentence.
James, while John had had " had ", had had " had had "; " had had " had had a better effect on the teacher.
And I should perhaps repunctuate my earlier comment. Though I did have the decency to use a semi-colon originally, at least.
"… that’s the trouble with “with”; with “with”, with this specific example, one might mean either “alongside” or “using”.
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When I was in junior high school, the teachers gave us this sentence to parse:
“what is is what is not is not is that all there is it is”
We were given two correct answers:
“What is is. What is not is not. Is that all there is? It is.”
“What is is what is. Not is not. Is that all there is? It is.”
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In both of those answers I count four sentences. That that that that is the answer annoys me should be obvious goes without saying.
And here’s another (naming no names) from another thread.
They’re worse of a pest than …
They’re a worse pest would have been far more elegant and not sent some readers’ brains into a tailspin resulting from its grammatical wrongness.
Think of countless other comparatives and see how clunky this is.
He’s quicker of a runner than …
They’re greener of a vegetable than …
It’s higher of a building than …
Is it something about the irregular nature of bad, worse, worst as opposed to, say, quick, quicker, quickest that enables this sort of grammatical error?
I’m afraid to say that USians are giving ‘of’ a bad name.
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Wouldn’t you want to say “They’re worse pests…” though? 
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Either. Pest is also in this context both/either singular and/or plural.
Are there any fine distinctions? Ok, let’s try…
Saying they are pests, implies each one individually is a pest. Whereas they are a pest is about them being a pest in numbers, perhaps?
Rats are worse pests than mice. All rats, together or individually, are worse than…
Rats are a worse pest than mice. Rats collectively are worse than…
A rat is a worse pest than a mouse. Any one rat is worse than…
I’m not even convinced, myself, that there is any real distinction between the first two, though.
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Actually, perhaps the distinction is more
Pest can describe the thing that is a pest (the rat, the mouse)
Pests describes the thing above in the plural (rats, mice)
Rats are a pest (plural things as a singular pest) may be more about the impact of the pest - the pestilence they cause, rather than what they are? (I’m thinking out loud here so just testing ideas.)
ETA but I still think the distinction is so fine in most usages as to be almost non-existent
So, grammatically, “pest” is equivalent to “nuisance?” I can see that.
It’s interesting. If the comparative were “more” or “less,” the sentence would need “of.” What distinguishes more and less from other adjectives?
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Hmm - just read that one. I disagree that the second answer is a correct answer. ‘Not is not’ hardly makes any real sense.
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The exercise was to add punctuation, so perhaps it was more like: “Not” is not.
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Hmm - dunno, off the top of my head.
(Adjectives or comparatives? Are all adjectives comparatives? )
Some, more, most
Few, fewer, fewest
???, less, least
(Having a brain fart - what goes where ??? is? Anything? Some?)
Sigh - just stream-of-consciousnessing at this point. Have to leave and do some work, so no time to think and analyse properly. Back much later, I hope.
I suppose that more, most, less and least can only function as comparatives/superlatives, so that might explain it indeed.
Brain fart answer: Little?
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D’oh!
Little having two meanings/usages
Little, less, least
Little, littler, littlest
(Off now to do some real work!)
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@Jesse13927 By the by I am not sure it is correct that
… . as possibly shown above
Some, more, most
Little, less, least
Anyway, here’s another one from today’s BB headlines:
“Ethically sourced” cocaine forcing posh Brits to pay out the nose
Pay OUT the nose???!!!?!?!?
This conjures visions of a very long flexible nose being paid out like a line of rope.
Or someone having won a bet where the prize was a nose and the loser having to pay out.
Pay THROUGH the nose, is the actual expression as an idiom used to mean reluctantly paying more than necessary.
I mean, we could turn it into a party game, seeing as prepositions just don’t matter any more, it seems.
Like …under a Scotsman’s kilt, we could turn Pay xxx the nose into a game where one inserts a random preposition just to see if the result could be a new and meaningful expression, or just ridiculous and humorous.
Pay behind the nose?
Pay under the nose?
Pay before the nose?
Pay within the nose?
Pay up the nose?
Nah, doesn’t really work, does it. 
Since the origin of the phrase “pay through? the nose” has been lost it isn’t really surprising that the preposition would be unstable since there isn’t really any semantics to hang on it. Trying to figure out why it should be “through” rather than “up” is fairly challenging.
And in any event, it is still a common enough idiom that familiarity alone should maintain it. That anyone was sufficiently hazy about such an idiom (and only chose it because of the pun associated with the topic - cocaine) to take a stab at some other preposition (when Google would have been their friend - do writers do NO research of fact checking these days? Not if one is a mere blogger, apparently) and think it still sounded right, is the most depressing part of all this.
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Farewell as a verb?!
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Farewell as a verb. For instance Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Collins all list that as chiefly from Australia and New Zealand, but nevertheless they all list it.
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Well I’ll be an uncle’s monkey…
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