Instead of inventing the word "beginnator" as the opposite of terminator, how about "initiator"? It's already an English word. Statement initiator vs. statement terminator--I think that sounds reasonable.

I've seen some confusion as to what constitutes a statement in T-SQL. For example, I've seen this:

BEGIN TRY;

-- try block

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH;

-- catch block

END CATCH;

There is no semi-colon after END TRY because the parser doesn't allow it. The semi-colons after BEGIN TRY and BEGIN CATCH are empty statements, not statement terminators. Both BEGIN constructs are opening a scope.

Note that WITH doesn't require a semi-colon on the previous statement if it's the first statement in its scope.

CREATE PROC try_test AS

DECLARE @i INT = 2 -- missing a semi colon

BEGIN TRY

WITH x AS (SELECT @i AS y)

SELECT *

FROM x;

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH

-- do nothing

END CATCH;

GO

EXEC try_test;

GO

DROP PROC try_test;

Of course, you don't want to rely on the beginning of a scope. That declaration should have a semi-colon terminator. But I'm getting tired of seeing "terminators" on BEGIN constructs.