Parenthesis

Parenthesis has stopped being a punctuation mark!!

You can vouch for this when you read the conversation in the later part of the blog.

The dictionary gives several meanings to this word.

But two of them which I'm thinking about now are

a) a qualifying, explanatory, or appositive word, phrase, clause, or sentence that interrupts a syntactic construction without otherwise affecting it.

b) an interval.

Can someone be an interval, a break, in someone's life??

Yes, if you check out the scene below from the 2009 hit movie - Up In The Air

The conversation (on the cell phone) has Ryan (George Clooney) and Alex (Vera Farmiga) talking about their relationship.  

Ryan was in a casual relationship with Alex, meeting her at various airports across the US. 

Ryan had thought Alex was his special lady and had gone to her home on a surprise visit. It was he who got a surprise - when he saw that Alex was already married and had kids too.

Alex calls him up the next day and tells him that her family life should be unaffected, and that her husband and kids were part of her "real" life.

And this is how the conversation proceeded.

Ryan Bingham: I thought I was a part of your life.

Alex Goran: I thought we signed up for the same thing... I thought our relationship was perfectly clear. You are an escape. You're a break from our normal lives. You're a parenthesis.

Ryan Bingham: I'm a parenthesis? 

This makes me wonder whether affairs, and extra-marital affairs, would be labeled as "Parenthesis" in the near future!!