by Lynne Truss
Non-writers are wary of both the colon and the semicolon, though, partly because all this rarefied debate rages above their heads. Eric Partridge, in his 1953 book You Have a Point There, says that using colons in your writing is the equivalent of playing the piano with crossed hands. But sadly, anyone lazily looking for an excuse not to master the colon and semicolon can always locate a respectable reason, because so many are advanced. Here are some of the most common:
1 They are old-fashioned
2 They are middle-class
3 They are optional
4 They are mysteriously connected to pausing
5 They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)
6 The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man
I hope we shall happily demolish all these objections in the following pages. But it is worth remarking that Fleet Street style gurus fly the flag for most of the prejudices listed above – especially as applied to the semicolon, a mark they increasingly strike out with puritanical gusto. The semicolon has currently fallen out of fashion with newspapers, the official reason being that readers of newsprint prefer their sentences short, their paragraphs bite-sized and their columns of type uncluttered by wormy squiggles. It’s more likely that the real reasons are a pathetic editorial confusion about usage and a policy of distrusting contributors even when they demonstrably know their onions. But heigh-ho. There is no point trying to turn the clock back. The great theatre critic James Agate, in his diary for 1935, recorded how a notoriously fastidious fellow journalist “once telephoned a semicolon from Moscow”. Well. You could imagine the reception he would get today.
Are the colon and semicolon old-fashioned? No, but they are old. The first printed semicolon was the work of good old Aldus Manutius just two years after Columbus sailed to the New World, and at the same date and place as the invention of double-entry book-keeping. But although I still swoon every time I look at this particular semicolon from 1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma. The medieval scribes had used a symbol very similar to our modern semicolon in their Latin transcripts to indicate abbreviations (thus “atque” might appear as “atq;”). The Greeks used the semicolon mark to indicate a question (and still do, those crazy guys). Meanwhile, a suspiciously similar mark (the punctus versus) was used by medieval scribes to indicate a termination in a psalm. But let’s face it, we are not really interested in those dusty old medieval monks. What really concerns us is that, while both the colon and the semicolon had been adopted into English well before 1700, confusion has surrounded their use ever since, and it is really only in the past few decades that grammarians have worked out a clear and satisfactory system for their application – tragically, at precisely the time when modern technological communication threatens to wipe out the subtleties of punctuation altogether.
For many years grammarians were a bit cagey about the difference between the colon and semicolon. Perhaps the colon was more “literary” than the semicolon? One grammarian, writing in 1829, lamented the two marks as “primeval sources of improfltable contention”. By and large, however, it was decided that the way to satisfy the punters was to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight. Thus the comma is the lightest mark, then the semicolon, then the colon, then the full stop. Cecil Hartley, in his Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing (1818), includes this little poem, which tells us the simple one-two-three of punctuation values.
The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev’ry clause.
At ev’ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree.
This system of sorting punctuation marks as if they were musical rests of ascending value has gone unquestioned for a long time, but do you know what I think? I think it’s rubbish. Complete nonsense. Who counts to two? Who counts to three? Imagine all those poor devils who have, abiding by this ridiculous rule, sat at desks for the past three centuries, tapping pencils and trying to work out whether “To err is human, tap, tap, to forgive divine” is superior to “To err is human, tap, tap, TAP, to forgive divine” – before bursting into tears because each version sounds as bad as the other. The idea of the semicolon as an imperceptible bit weightier than a comma, and the colon as a teensy bit lighter than a full stop, is a wrong-headed way of both characterising the colon and semicolon, and (especially) sorting them out. They are not like so many bags of sugar attached to the belt of a sentence to slow it down. Quite the opposite. Here is the American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon:
The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added [ … ] The period [or full stop] tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with the semicolon there you get a pleasant feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Expectation is what these stops are about; expectation and elastic energy. Like internal springs, they propel you forward in a sentence towards more information, and the essential difference between them is that while the semicolon lightly propels you in any direction related to the foregoing (“Wheel Surprise me!”), the colon nudges you along lines already subtly laid down. How can such useful marks be optional, for heaven’s sake? As for the other thing, if they are middle-class, I’m a serviette. Of the objections to the colon and semicolon listed above, there is pnly one I am prepared to concede: that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends. Their agents gently remind them, “George Orwell managed without, you know. And look what happened to Marcel Proust: carry on like this and you’re only one step away from a cork-lined room!” But the writers rock back and forth on their office chairs, softly tapping the semicolon key and emitting low whimpers. I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: “I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.”
So how should you use the colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon “delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words”, which is not a bad image to start with. But the holy text of the colon and semicolon is the letter written by George Bernard Shaw to T. E. Lawrence in 1924, ticking him off for his over-use of colons in the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This superb missive starts with the peremptory, “My dear Luruns [sic], Confound you and your book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo” – and then gets even more offensive and hilarious as it goes on. Shaw explains that, having worked out his own system for colons and semicolons, he has checked it against the Bible, and seen that the Bible almost got it right. With such authority behind him, he is offended by Lawrence’s cavalier attitude. “I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces,” he explains. “As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rules for you.”
Shaw is quite famous for his idiosyncratic punctuation. His semicolons, in particular, were his way of making his texts firmly actor-proof – in fact, when Ralph Richardson tried to insert a few dramatic puffs and pants in his opening lines as Bluntschli in a 1931 production of Arms and the Man (1894), Shaw stopped him at once and told him to forget the naturalism and observe the punctuation instead. “This is all very well, Richardson,” Shaw said (according to Richardson’s account), “and it might do for Chekhov, but it do
esn’t do for me. Your gasps are upsetting my stops and my semicolons, and you’ve got to stick to them.” Richardson said Shaw spoke the truth about this: miss any of Shaw’s stops and “the tune won’t come off”. Look at any Shaw text and you will find both colons and semicolons in over-abundance, with deliberate spacing to draw attention to them, too, as if they are genuine musical notation.
Captain Bluntschli. I am very glad to see you ; but you must leave this house at once. My husband has just returned with my future son-in-law ; and they know nothing. If they did, the consequences would be terrible. You are a foreigner : you do not feel our national animosities as we do.
Arms and the Man, Act II
To adopt George Bernard Shaw’s use of the semicolon today would obviously be an act of insanity. But in the letter to T. E. Lawrence he is sound on the colon. When two statements are “placed baldly in dramatic apposition”, he said, use a colon. Thus, “Luruns could not speak: he was drunk.” Shaw explains to Lawrence that when the second statement reaffirms, explains or illustrates the first, you use a colon; also when you desire an abrupt “pull-up”: “Luruns was congenitally literary: that is, a liar.”
You will see [writes Shaw] that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician’s assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.
In each of the following examples, incidentally, can’tyou hear a delighted, satisfied “Yes!” where the colon comes?
This much is clear, Watson: it was the baying of an enormous hound.
(This much is clear, Watson – yes! it was the baying of an enormous hound.)
Tom has only one rule in life: never eat anything bigger than your head.
(Tom had only one rule in life – yes! never eat anything bigger than your head.)
I pulled out all the stops with Kerry-Anne: I used a semicolon.
(I pulled out all the stops with Kerry-Anne – yes! I used a semicolon.)
But the “annunciatory” colon is only one variety. As well as the “Yes!” type colon, there is the “Ah” type, when the colon reminds us there is probably more to the initial statement than has met the eye:
I loved Opal Fruits as a child: no one else did.
(I loued Opal Fruits – ah, but nobody else did.)
You can do it: and you will do it.
(You can do it – ah, and you will do it.)
A classic use of the colon is as a kind fulcrum between two antithetical or oppositional statements:
Man proposes: God disposes.
And as Shaw put it so well, the colon can simply pull up the reader for a nice surprise:
I find fault with only three things in this story of yours, Jenkins: the beginning, the middle and the end.
So colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part. They also have several formal introductory roles. They start lists (especially lists using semicolons):
In later life, Kerry-Anne found there were three qualities she disliked in other people: Britishness; superior airs; and a feigned lack of interest in her dusting of freckles.
They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:
Berks and Wankers: a pessimist’s view of language preservation
Gandhi II: The Mahatma Strikes Back
Conventionally, they separate dramatic characters from dialogue:
PHILIP: Kerry-Anne! Hold still! You’ve got some gunk on your face!
KERRY-ANNE: They’re freckles, Philip. How many more times?
They also start off long quotations and (of course) introduce examples in books on punctuation. What a useful chap the colon is, after all. Forget about counting to three, that’s all I ask.
So when do you use a semicolon? As we learned in the comma chapter, the main place for putting a semicolon if you are not John Updike is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, and where a comma would be ungrammatical:
I loved Opal Fruits; they are now called Starburst, of course.
It was the baying of an enormous hound; it came from over there!
I remember him when he couldn’t write his own name on a gate; now he’s Prime Minister.
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence. The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can’t use it wrongly – which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue. But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash. Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when the connection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense:
I loved Opal Fruits – why did they call them Starburst? – reminds me of that joke “What did Zimbabwe used to be called? – Rhodesia. What did Iceland used to be called? – Bejam!”
So it is true that we must keep an eye on the dash – and also the ellipsis (…), which is turning up increasingly in emails as shorthand for “more to come, actually… it might be related to what I’ve just written … but the main thing is I haven’t finished … let’s just wait and see … I could go on like this for hours …” However, so long as there remain sentences on this earth that begin with capital letters and end with full stops, there will be a place for the semicolon. True, its use is never obligatory, because a full stop ought always to be an alternative. But that only makes it the more wonderful.
Popotakis had tried a cinema, a dance hall, baccarat, and miniature golf; now he had four ping-pong tables. He had made good money, for the smart set of Jacksonburg were always hard put to get through the rainy season; the polyglot professional class had made it their rendezvous; even attachés from the legislations and younger members of the Jackson family had come there.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, 1938
The semicolon has been rightly called “a compliment from the writer to the reader”. And a mighty compliment it is, too. The sub-text of a semicolon is, “Now this is a hint. The elements of this sentence, although grammatically distinct, are actually elements of a single notion. I can make it plainer for you – but hey! You’re a reader! I don’t need to draw you a map!” By the same token, however, an overreliance on semicolons – to give an air of authorial intention to half-formed ideas thrown together on the page – is rather more of a compliment than some of us care to receive. The American writer Paul Robinson, in his essay “The Philosophy of Punctuation” (2002), says that “pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. “They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.” Those are my italics, by the way – but it does sound as if Robinson is a bit worked up. “The semicolon has become so hateful to me,” he says in all seriousness, “that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.”
There are times, however, when the semicolon is indispensable in another capacity: when it performs the duties of a kind
of Special Policeman in the event of comma fights. If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation. One minute the semicolon is gracefully joining sentences together in a flattering manner (and sullying Mr Robinson), and the next it is calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention.
Fares were offered to Corfu, the Greek island, Morocco, Elba, in the Mediterranean, and Paris. Margaret thought about it. She had been to Elba once and had found it dull, to Morocco, and found it too colourful.
There is no option for an upstanding semicolon in such circumstances other than to step in, blow a whistle and restore order.
Fares were offered to Corfu, the Greek island; Morocco; Elba, in the Mediterranean; and Paris. Margaret thought about it. She had been to Elba once and had found it dull; to Morocco, and found it too colourful.
That’s much clearer. And we have you to thank, Special Policeman Semicolon. There are two dangers, however, associated with this quell-the-rampant-comma use. One is that, having embarked on a series of clarifying semicolons, the writer loses interest, or forgets, and lapses into a comma (ho ho). The other danger is that weak-charactered writers will be encouraged to ignore the rule that only full sentences should be joined by the semicolon. Sometimes – and I’ve never admitted this to anyone before – I adopt a kind of stream-of-consciousness sentence structure; somewhat like Virginia Woolf; without full sentences; but it feels OK to do this; rather worrying.
Let us come swiftly to the last proper use of the semicolon. As we discovered in the comma chapter, it is wrong to write, “He woke up in his own bed, however, he felt fine.” Linking words such as “however”, “nevertheless”, “also”, “consequently” and “hence” require a semicolon – and, I have to say, this seems pretty self-evident to me. Much as I decry the old count-to-two system, there is an obvious take-a-breath thing going on here. When you read the sentence, “He woke up in his own bed, and he felt fine”, you don’t draw breath before the “and”. You rattle on. Whereas when you read, “He woke up in his own bed; nevertheless, he was OK”, an inhalation is surely automatic.
