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

For my parents,

who made sure I always had enough to read

Epigraph

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

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?

17  Acknowledgements

18  Notes

19  Index

20  About the Author

21  About the Publisher

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Introduction

Love, Hate and Semicolons

‘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.

* 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

Deep History

The Birth of the Semicolon

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines both of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record punctuation testing and tinkering by fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a ‘cultural rebirth’ after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.

One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers.

In this snippet, you can see four of these brand-new semicolons. You might think you see eight, but beware! That semicolonish mark at the end of the fourth line from the bottom isn’t a semicolon, it’s an abbreviation for que, Latin for ‘and’. In this case, it’s helping to shorten neque, or ‘also not’. It appears elsewhere in the excerpt, always filling in the –ue part of a que. If you look closely, you’ll see that the dot-and-curve combination is raised higher up than a semicolon; it’s positioned on the same level as the words in the text because it’s shorthand for a word instead of a signal to pause.

Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. Jenson’s is a simple shooting star. We moderns have accumulated a host of characterful semicolons to choose from: Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat, slouched against the wall at a party. Gill Sans MT’s semicolon has perfect posture, while Didot’s puffs its chest out pridefully. (For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut* disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’.)

The semicolon had successfully colonised the letter cases of the best presses in Europe, but other newborn punctuation marks were not so lucky. The humanists tried out a lot of new punctuation ideas, but most of those marks had short lifespans. Some of the printed texts that appeared in the centuries surrounding the semicolon’s birth look as though they are written partially in secret code: they are filled with mysterious dots, dashes, swoops, and curlicues. There were marks for the minutest distinctions and the most specific occasions. For instance, there was once a punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark, which was a mirror-image version of the question mark. Why did the semicolon survive and thrive when other marks did not? Probably because it was useful. Readers, writers, and printers found that the semicolon was worth the trouble to insert. The rhetorical question mark, on the other hand, faltered and then fizzled out completely. This isn’t too surprising: does anyone really need a special punctuation mark to know when a question is rhetorical?

In humanist times, just as in our own, hand-wringing sages forecast a literary apocalypse precipitated by too-casual attitudes to punctuation. ‘It is not concealed from you how great a shortage there is of intelligent scribes in these times,’ wrote one French humanist to another,

and above all in transcribing those things which observe style to any degree; in which unless points and marks of distinctions, by which the style flows through the cola, commata, and periodi, are separated with more attentive diligence, that which is written is confused and barbarous … Which carelessness, in my opinion, has occurred chiefly since we have for a long time lacked eloquence, in which these things are necessary: the ancient manner of handwriting, therefore, in which the scribes of books (antiquarii) were gradually writing a perfect and correctly formed script with precise punctuation (certa distinctione) of clausulae and with notes of accentuation, has perished together with the art of expression (dictatu).

The entire art of expression – dead, because careless writers just couldn’t hack it when it came to punctuation. Well, I think we moderns might maintain that the art of expression gave us a few rather decent literary works even after the date of this fifteenth-century letter. But the lament of the French humanists is familiar, isn’t it? People can’t punctuate correctly, eloquence is slowly dying out. Plus ça change.

Still, a few bad-tempered complainants notwithstanding, most humanists believed that each writer should work out his punctuation for himself,† rather than employing a predetermined set of rules. A writer or an annotating reader was to exercise his own taste and judgment. This idea of punctuation as a matter of individual taste and style outlived the humanists: it stretched beyond the Latin texts that Manutius printed, crossing borders and oceans, and it survived as a way of thinking about the practice of punctuation well into the eighteenth century. When the topic of punctuation usage came up, a reader was likely to be advised that he should consider the punctuation marks analogous to rests in music, and deploy them according to the musical effect he wanted to achieve. How on earth did this idea of the writer as musician, which held on for hundreds of years, transform into our comparatively new expectation that writers must submit to rigid rules?

* Back in the humanists’ day, the letters for a font were carved into steel bars. These were called ‘punches’. The technique was punch-cutting, and its practitioner a punch-cutter.

† In those days, it was usually a ‘him’, although there were of course exceptions.

II

The Science of Semicolons

English Grammar Wars

Goold Brown, an American schoolteacher and grammar obsessive, had a lofty ambition: he wanted to produce ‘something like a complete grammar of the English language’. Twenty-seven years after first resolving to undertake this task, he finally published The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection* of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1851 printing of his own book.†

Where were all of these grammar books that Goold Brown surveyed coming from, and what had made them explode in number so suddenly, after several quiet centuries of minimal punctuation guidance for writers? A jaunt through some of the most popular grammar books of the nineteenth century will reveal that their authors were shrewd entrepreneurs taking advantage of a newly developed and highly lucrative market for education in English writing; in both America and Britain, access to public education expanded exponentially over the course of the nineteenth century, and with it, the opportunity to make a killing supplying schools with teaching materials. These early grammarians were also masters of the biting insult, as they jockeyed for position (and market share) with one another. And – perhaps most surprisingly – they were aspiring scientists. We have to understand the great shift these authors created in the way people thought about English grammar in order to understand the semicolon’s transformation: although these first professional grammarians sought clarity through rules, they ended up creating confusion, and the semicolon was collateral damage.

The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth, a bishop in the Church of England and a professor of poetry at Oxford,‡ used his platform to boldly announce that it was his aim to ‘lay down rules’ for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time – true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.