Semicolon

Cecelia Watson, “Semicolon: The Past Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark”, Harper Collins, 2019, 181 pp

The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. Then there’s myself: grade school and high school put the fear of god in me; I had concluded that there was only one way to properly punctuate a sentence and I didn’t have a clue what it was.  And don’t get me started on diagramming sentences.  Anyway, I eventually found a new and satisfactory route to putting satisfactory sentences together: read good writers not just for content but for structure.  So, it is this later acquired attitude that led me to read books such as Semicolon.

In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark.  She begins back when the period, colon, comma, and semicolon were only used to signal varying lengths of pauses.  She pays particular emphasis to the semicolon history.  The best example she ever found of using the semicolon is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” (see notes P. 164).  I have concluded writing, such as that exhibited by King, is 90 percent punctuation—punctuation that leads to clarity, not rigidly correct to some rule.

The first ruling when using the semicolon is uncontroversial. The semicolon keeps a sentence tidy by separating items in a list already cluttered with commas. (E.G.: The band played shows in Richmond, Va.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Asheville, N.C.). The second ruling has caused all the strife. Here, the semicolon takes the place of a period and yokes together two independent clauses that could function as sentences on their own. (The band is terrible; I regret following them on tour.)

In this second capacity, semicolons are discretionary. They add shading and allow one thought to ripen into another. 

My Notes:

Pg. 13:  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 half of each of those marks.  It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules. 

Pg. 27:  A successful book on grammar, English Grammar, by Lindley Murray went into twenty-four editions, reprinted by sixteen different American publishers between 1797 and 1870, and it sold so many copies that it was the best-selling book in the world between 1800 and 1840.  Then along came Samuel Kirkham who relied on Greek and Latin grammar to come up with rules for English.  Rebel grammarian Isaiah J. Morris attacked this Greek-Latin grammar as an error.

Pg. 51f:  By the 1880s, grammarians distinguished between rhetorical pauses, which were akin to pauses in speaking and were not to be marked by punctuation; and grammatical pauses, which required punctuation in order to make the structural and logical attributes of a sentence clear.  Grammarians began to generally prescribe the use of a semicolon only for use between independent clauses or to separate items in a list that was long enough to be subdivided with commas.  So, in 130 years the semicolon function had been whittled down to one or two applications. 

Pg. 162f:  Martin Luther King:  King wrote longhand in the margins of a newspaper while imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 for civil disobedience.  The letter defends King’s agitation for civil rights against fellow clergymen who felt he should show more patience.  The passage from the letter that contains the remarkable use of semicolons is a long one, and the author of this book proposes the best usage she ever read.

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’  But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch our mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

(After reading the above, try to edit it:  try separating clauses by periods, etc.  It just will not be as good and will lose meaning and suffer a significant loss of rhythm.)

Pg. 183:  At the very least, by reflecting on the history of the commas, colons, question marks, and semicolons that dot our written language, we can gain some of the perspective necessary to properly evaluate the virtues and vices of rules. 

Addenda: some notes I have taken over the years:

Do not join independent clauses by a comma. If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon (or a period).

Stevenson's romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures.

It is nearly half past five; we cannot reach town before dark.

Semi-colon. colon, and comma combinations:

“Today he ranges over the right field territory like a shaggy buffalo endowed with the legs of an antelope; he throws to the bases with bullet-like speed and accuracy; he slides on a close play with all the abandon of an express train trying to make up lost time, and at-bat he crashes his terrific home run to right field, crosses a wary infield with a delicate bunt, or shortens his grip and pokes singles and doubles to any field.”  (About Babe Ruth by writer Walter Camp).

Darwin's half-cousin Sir Francis Galton who was a: statistician, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, explorer; geographer, inventor, meteorologist, psychometrician and soon to be a knight of the realm; offered to see if he could help throw some light on the subject.

Colon:

• Use between a grammatically complete introductory clause (one that could stand as a sentence) and a final phrase or clause that illustrates, extends, or amplifies the preceding thought.  If the clause following the colon is a complete sentence, it begins with a capital letter.
• Use a colon to introduce a list: thing one, thing two, and thing three.
• Use it to pause and explain: this sentence makes the point.
• Use it to give an example: this, for instance.

No matter what kind of economic environment homebuyers find themselves in, one thing always holds true: They’ll be looking for a deal.

Examples of notable uses of the semicolon:

Order and cleanliness, gone; work, material security, gone; making progress and hope, gone.  (from Hans Fallada, Little Man – What Now? (1932)

Primitive humans should be viewed with pity rather than censure, because they knew nothing of the natural causes of disease; of earthquakes, floods, and lightning; of physical or psychic pain and could, therefore, do nothing but call upon the supernatural to save them.

Some communities thrived; others failed; all played a role in the ongoing process of investment, construction, homebuilding, and economic expansion—and its attendant cycles of success, failure, bankruptcy, and renewal. (Cattle Kingdom).