Is this intended as satire of the word “sentence”?
some extremely long-ass sentences
Prose like that will need a second cup of coffee, indeed.
You must have skipped over his honorific…
More than one semicolon in a sentence is just rude.
How about two sets of em dashes, three semicolons and 4 bullet points?
If I were an Honor English teacher, I would make my students diagram these. Maybe for extra credit.
If your target audience includes “idiots”, you might want to rethink your strategy, or at least your sentence structure. 
slow clap
rising to applaud
wild, cheering, standing ovation
Why this is a gimmicky article, in one sentence: its title implies that it will be brief and emphatic, but instead it is long and somewhat expected; its main tactic seems to be to take what other articles have said and to replace the full-stops with dashes and semicolons—this creates an effect almost, but not entirely, unlike brevity and emphasis; in closing, a sentence is meant to be an articulation of “a complete thought” (a thing which may or may not exist, but that’s another discussion) so by jamming together twenty thoughts in a single “sentence” you aren’t fooling anybody—just annoying them.
I had a thought the other day in one of those weird moments of “woke up at 3am” clarity. Donald Trump, a man everyone thought was a complete joke, shot to the front of the pack and is now the Republican nominee. But the media keeps acting like Bernie’s campaign is the crazy, pipe-dream one. I mean, if I’d asked people at the start of this what they thought was more insane, I’m pretty sure they’d all have said Trump running.
Trump was part of a field of what, 8 or 10 contenders? Hillary had no other serious opposition. I think Trump being the nominee is WAY crazier than Bernie staying in the race until the bitter end.
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually care who gets the Dem nod at this point because I’m against letting Trump fuck up the Supreme Court for the next 30 years.)
I read this as “Horror English,” which actually seems more appropriate here.
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Yes, I saw this episode of Last Week Tonight too. The argument seems to be, “well, she has a majority, but it’s not enough of a majority!” and “life isn’t fair”.
I’m fairly sure I didn’t dream of some professor or other quoted as being overheard starting a sentence with the word “Ninthly, …” but I can’t google up any reference to it.
But as the academic in question used separate sentences it probably doesn’t matter anyway.
As my native language is German and I have also learned Latin at school, struggling through Caesar’s and Cicero’s mind-boggingly long sentences but later looking back at them with a feeling of nostalgia - Horace’s short verses are much harder to decipher -, long sentences do not scare me, but I must say that a semicolon basically joins two gramatically independent sentences together binding them just slightly closer to each other than a period would have done, which leads me to conclude that, while I deplore Kurt Vonnegut’s transphobic remarks about semicolons (thanks to @RevVeggieSpam for mentioning it though), the use of semicolons to construct long sentences is an unfair practice that might even be referred to as cheating, considering the fact that the text on both sides of the semicolon could exist as two separate sentences with no substantial change in meaning; in other words, I count my post here as two sentences.
In German you should be able to explain why Sanders in still campaigning in eight nouns, right?
Indeed, German can form beautifully long nouns, but there are limits. Rule of thumb: if you can somehow badly express the meaning in English by having spaces in between in English, you have a good chance of expressing it nicely with a single German compound noun.
It’s generally impossible to express various conjunctions in compound nouns, the compound noun as a whole still has to be, well, a noun, not a statement. Also, the things you glue together must be (mostly) nouns themselves; if something can only be expressed by an adjective, you’re out of luck.
So, for example:
“if a Democratic primary candidate fails to meet that threshold, …”
would normally translate to “Wenn ein demokratischer Vorwahlkandidat diesen Schwellwert nicht erreicht, …”,
with the compounds “Vor-wahl-kandidat” = “pre-election-candidate” and “Schwellwert” = “threshold-value”.
But if I tried hard, I could maybe just barely get away with saying: “Im Vorwahlschwellwertsverfehlungsfall …”.
Meaning, “In the pre-election-threshold-value-missing-case”, “in the case of missing the threshold for the primary election”. Note that I’ve left out some superflous details; we know we’re talking about a democratic candidate, don’t we?
Of course, the people who choose to use words like that are deliberately being evil, just like the people who write page-long sentences in English. It’s not regular German.
Additionally, German and Austrian politicians, and some business people, have a tendency to exhibit a very limited verb vocabulary. It’s even worse than in “Business English.” Also, they prefer to use these verbs only in passive voice.
They won’t begin to discuss how to reform the bureaucracy. Instead, they will just say that “Discussions on a reform of the bureaucracy will be initiated.”
