Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life

Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life
Cecelia Watson

‘Fascinating… I loved this book; I really did’ David Crystal, Spectator A biography of a much misunderstood punctuation mark and a call to arms in favour of clear expression and against stifling grammar rules. Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored. One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it. Forget the rules; you’re in charge. It’s time to make language do what you want it to.

(#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)

Copyright (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)

Dedication (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)

For my parents,

who made sure I always had enough to read

Epigraph (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)

Punctuation is a gentle and unobtrusive art that has long been one of the misfortunes of man. For about three hundred years it has been harassing him, and bewildering him with its quiet contrariness, and no amount of usage seems to make him grow in familiarity with the art.

‘Power of Points: Punctuation That Upset Work of Solons’, Boston Daily Globe, 20 January 1901

Contents

1  Cover (#ucf172f39-24f2-516a-bedd-cb174fc48006)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  Introduction: Love, Hate and Semicolons

8  I: Deep History

9  II: The Science of Semicolons

10  III: Sexy Semicolons

11  IV: Loose Women and Liquor Laws

12  V: The Minutiae of Mercy

13  VI: Carving Semicolons in Stone

14  VII: Semicolon Savants

15  VIII: Persuasion and Pretension

16  Conclusion: Against the Rules? (#litres_trial_promo)

17  Acknowledgements

18  Notes

19  Index

20  About the Author

21  About the Publisher

LandmarksCover (#ucf172f39-24f2-516a-bedd-cb174fc48006)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

Love, Hate and Semicolons (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)

‘The semicolon has become so hateful to me,’ confessed Paul Robinson in a New Republic essay, ‘that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.’ When Robinson, a humanities professor at Stanford, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he’s filled with ‘exasperation’. Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted foe, but he’s hardly its only modern detractor. Novelists from George Orwell to Donald Barthelme have held forth on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both. Kurt Vonnegut advised omitting them entirely, accusing them of ‘representing absolutely nothing. All they do,’ he admonished writers, ‘is show you’ve been to college.’ And almost 800,000 people have shared a web comic that labels the semicolon ‘the most feared punctuation mark on earth’. Yet when the Italian humanists invented the semicolon in the fifteenth century, they conceived of it as an aid to clarity, not (as Professor Robinson now characterises it) a ‘pretentious’ mark used chiefly to ‘gloss over an imprecise thought’. In the late 1800s, the semicolon was downright trendy, its frequency of use far outstripping that of one of its relatives, the colon. How did the semicolon, once regarded with admiration, come to seem so offensive, so unwieldy, to so many people?

Asking this question might seem academic in all the worst ways: what practical value could there be in mulling over punctuation, and in particular its history, when we have efficiently slim guidebooks like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and thick reference volumes like The Oxford Manual of Style to set straight our misplaced colons and commas? We have rules for this sort of thing! But rule-based punctuation guides are a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 1800s, the majority of grammarians and scholars advocated personal taste and judgment as a guide to punctuating, or ‘pointing’, a text. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher George Campbell, writing the same year the United States Declaration of Independence was signed, argued that ‘language is purely a species of fashion … It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech.’

Yet what Campbell and most of his contemporaries thought was a ‘preposterous’ idea soon became a commonplace principle: as the 1700s drew to a close, new grammar books began to espouse systems of rules that were purportedly derived from logic. In these new books, grammarians didn’t hesitate to impugn the grammar of writers traditionally considered superb stylists: Milton and Shakespeare were chastised for ‘gross mistakes’, and subjected to grammarians’ emendations, so that these great authors’ works were made to fall in line with rules established centuries after their deaths.

But a strange thing happened as the new genre of grammar rule books developed: instead of making people less confused about grammar, rule books seemed to cause more problems. No one knew which system of rules was the most correct one, and the more specific the grammarians made their guidelines for using punctuation marks like the semicolon, the more confusing those punctuation marks became. The more defined the function of the semicolon became, the more anxiety people experienced about when to use a semicolon in writing and how to interpret one while reading. Grammarians fought viciously over the supremacy of their individual sets of rules, scorching one another in the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars. Courts of law, too, were in a lather over how to deal with punctuation marks: a semicolon in an 1875 legal statute caused all of Boston to fly into a panic when courts opined that it meant that alcohol couldn’t be served past 11 p.m. (Bostonians, ever resourceful, devised some pretty clever ways to get drunk well into the wee hours until the statute was finally revised six years after it went into force.)

The story of the semicolon told in these pages follows a chronological path, charting its transformation from a mark designed to create clarity to a mark destined to create confusion. The events described here epitomise the major steps in the life of the semicolon: they show how it was transformed over time, and what was important about those transformations. That importance lies in the semicolon’s ability to symbolise and trigger ideas and emotions that transcend the punctuation mark itself. The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink.

The semicolon’s biography is also a story about grammar and language more generally – and this history will challenge the myth most of us like to tell ourselves about grammar. Grammar (in our mythical narrative) is part of the good old days: people used to know grammar properly, we think, the same way they used to walk three miles to school uphill in the snow, and everyone was polite and better looking and thin and well dressed. There are reasons why these romantic visions of the past flourish in our collective consciousness: the stories of our grandparents; old black-and-white portraits that freeze the past in Sunday best; and most powerfully of all, a vague shared sense that the world is growing less innocent and less coherent, and that the past must therefore be better the further back uphill into it we are able to climb. Things were harder in some ways back then, we acknowledge; but weren’t they also better and purer, too?

‘It’s tough being a stickler for puntuation these days,’ sighs Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as if before ‘these days’ there was a time when everyone was committed to proper grammar and everyone agreed on what proper grammar constituted. Self-styled grammar ‘sticklers’, ‘snobs’, ‘nazis’, and ‘bitches’ want so much to get back to that point in the past where the majority of people respected language and understood its nuances, and society at large shared a common understanding of grammar rules. But that past utopia is a mirage. There was no time when everyone spoke flawless English and people punctuated ‘properly’. It’s important to come to grips with this historical fact, because it influences how we act in the present: after we nail down some basic punctuation history here through the story of the semicolon, I’ll show that hanging on to the old story about grammar – the mythical story – limits our relationship with language. It keeps us from seeing, describing, and creating beauty in language that rules can’t comprehend.

I wouldn’t deny that there’s joy in knowing a set of grammar rules; there is always joy in mastery of some branch of knowledge. But there is much more joy in becoming a reader who can understand and explain how it is that a punctuation mark can create meaning in language that goes beyond just delineating the logical structure of a sentence. Great punctuation can create music, paint a picture, or conjure emotions. This book will show you how the semicolon is essential to the effectiveness and aesthetic appeal of passages from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Irvine Welsh, Rebecca Solnit, and other masters of English fiction and non-fiction. Looking at these authors, we will see beautiful uses of the semicolon that cannot be adequately encapsulated in grammarians’ rules, nor explained simply as a ‘breaking’ of those rules.

Still, inadequate and artificial as grammar rules are, I understand what it’s like to love them. In fact, I’m a reformed grammar fetishist myself, the sort of person who used to feel that her love for English was best expressed by means of irritation at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe, or outright heart palpitations over a comma splice. My own dive into the history of the semicolon was precipitated by a fight over one that my PhD adviser, Bob,* had circled in one of my papers, alleging that it violated the precepts of The Chicago Manual of Style (at the time, Bob was chair of the board of the press that publishes the Manual). I insisted that the semicolon in question was a perfectly legitimate interpretation of one of the umpteen semicolon rules the Manual laid out, and round and round Bob and I went for weeks, grandstanding about the meaning of the Manual’s rules. Finally, during one of these heated debates, it occurred to me to wonder: Where do they come from, these rules I cherish so much, and believe I know so well?

Answering that question took me on a ten-year journey through piles of dusty grammar books that had lain untouched on library shelves for decades, and more often centuries. Some, having been forgotten for so long, collapsed in my hands; others left my palms tinted a guilty red with rot from their decaying leather bindings. But the words inside those old grammar books had lost none of their liveliness and passion, and I soon became absorbed in the drama of grammarians’ attempts to create a market for their rules in the face of an initially sceptical public. The story that I began to piece together from their pages called on all my skills as an academic. It demanded my expertise in the history of science: grammar rules, it turns out, began as an attempt to ‘scientise’ language, because science was what parents wanted their children to be taught in public [state] schools. Equally, the story of the semicolon called on my training in philosophy, as I began to wonder what ethical imperatives knowing the true history of grammar rules might impose. And finally, crucial to making sense of the story of the semicolon were my years of experience teaching writing at institutions like Yale, the University of Chicago, and Bard College.

By the time I had finished writing the story contained in these pages, I had changed everything about how I looked at grammar. I still love language, but I love it in a richer way. Not only did I become a better and more sensitive reader and a more capable teacher, I also became a better person. Perhaps that sounds like a fancifully hyperbolic claim – can changing our relationship with grammar really make us better human beings? By the end of this book, I hope to persuade you that reconsidering grammar rules will do exactly that, by refocusing us on the deepest, most primary value and purpose of language: true communication and openness to others.

But before I can try to persuade you of this, we have to look the past square in the face. Ever since grammar rules were invented, they have caused at least as much confusion and distress as they have ameliorated; and people living one hundred years ago had passions about semicolons that varied from decade to decade and person to person. In this regard, they aren’t so different from us after all: when you looked at the semicolons on the front of this book, you probably felt something. Was it hate, like Paul Robinson? Anger? Love? Curiosity? Confusion? The diminutive semicolon can inspire great passion. As you’ll see in the chapters that follow, it always has.

* (#ulink_4e0789ec-108d-58a1-9824-8d0e45784ce3) Robert J. Richards at the University of Chicago. As of 28 March 2018, Bob’s entry on Wikipedia contains semicolon usage that I’m quite certain would rankle him: ‘Richards earned two PhDs; one in the History of Science from the University of Chicago and another in Philosophy from St Louis University.’ Bob, I swear it wasn’t me!

I