Smith is going to speak about cars, Brown is going to speak about bikes.
This (sometimes called a ‘comma splice’) would make the reader think there was more to come, in the form of a list – a really bad miscue. It is, however, a common punctuation error, often unnoticed while we’re writing, but usually obvious if we take the trouble to read aloud what we’ve written.
Once we see that the role of the semicolon is to unite and divide at the same time, we can see how it can be used to show a relationship between units other than complete sentences. Let’s stay with Bleak House. In Chapter 6 we see Dickens uniting (yet keeping separate) elliptical sentences:
Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine; loves to hear the wind blow; loves to watch the changing lights and shadows; loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature’s great cathedral.
And in Chapter 8, we see Dickens linking phrases in his description of Chesney Wold:
As to the House itself, with its three peaks in the roof; its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty; its trellis-work, against the south front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look.
This is where the semicolon comes into its own. It allows a huge amount of detail to be compressed into a single sentence. People admire Dickens’s atmospheric sense of detail, the way he paints a vivid picture in a single sentence. The semicolon is one of the devices that enables him to do it.
The example also shows how the semicolon operates in the punctuation hierarchy, lying between the period and the comma. The same effect can’t be achieved by relying on commas alone. Indeed, if we do that, the result is increasing confusion:
As to the House itself, with its three peaks in the roof, its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty, its trellis-work, against the south front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look.
We need to breathe, to assimilate the different views as Dickens makes our eyes travel over the house; and the semicolon shows us where.
A similar organizational function appears when we look upwards in the hierarchy, towards the period. Note what is going on in this extract, also from Chapter 8, as Mr Jarndyce explains the workings of the law to Esther:
Equity sends questions to Law, Law sends questions back to Equity; Law finds it can’t do this, Equity finds it can’t do that; neither can so much as say it can’t do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie.
This is rhetorically very complex, but perfectly clear. And its clarity comes from the way the semicolon links not individual sentences, but pairs of sentences. Again, if the commas and semicolons were replaced by periods, the effect would be totally different. It’s not that the irony is lost; simply that the reader has to work harder in order to see it:
Equity sends questions to Law. Law sends questions back to Equity. Law finds it can’t do this. Equity finds it can’t do that.
This is always the best way to discover the function of the semicolon: replace it by something else, and see what happens.
To summarize: the semicolon allows us to see more clearly the structure of a complex sentence, especially one which is packed full of detail. It takes some of the load off the comma. There’s nothing semantically confusing about the sequence of adjectives and nouns in the following sentence; but the second version is much easier to read:
The menu offered us orange or apple juice, a boiled, fried, or poached egg, toast, and tea or coffee.
The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and tea or coffee.
Note that, in the interest of preserving the parallelism between the items in the list as a whole, we sometimes find the semicolon closing an item that consists of just one word.
The trick, in using the semicolon, is to maintain grammatical parallelism. The semicolon happily links two sentences, or two phrases, or even two words – but they are always two units of the same grammatical kind. It begins to feel uncomfortable when we try to make it link units at different levels:
The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and I had coffee.
The reason is that I had coffee is a separate topic. It’s no longer an item on a menu list. As such, it would be better presented as an afterthought, using a dash or ellipsis dots:
The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast – and I had coffee.
It’s often been reported that the semicolon is going out of fashion, and the evidence (from the study of large collections of written material) does support a steady drop in frequency during the twentieth century. (They’re much more common in British English than American English.) A typical finding is to see that 90 per cent of all punctuation marks are either periods or commas, and semicolons are just a couple of percent. The figure was much higher once. The semicolon had its peak in the eighteenth century, when long sentences were thought to be a feature of an elegant style, heavy punctuation was in vogue, and punctuation was becoming increasingly grammatical. The rot set in during the nineteenth century, when the colon became popular, and took over some of the semicolon’s functions. The economics of the telegraph (the shorter the message, the cheaper) fostered short sentences. And today it has virtually disappeared from styles where sentences tend to be short, such as on the Internet. Some online style manuals are unequivocal. For example, Michael Miller writes in Web Words That Work: Writing Web Copy That Sells (2013, Chapter 14):
you don’t want to include more than a single thought in any one sentence; social media does not welcome such complexity. Avoid semicolons, dashes, and all other enablers of compound sentences. If you have two clauses or thoughts to get across, put them in two separate sentences.
There are many such cautions expressed these days. We have to take them with a pinch of salt, though, as the writers often break their own rules. Note the two thoughts separated by a semicolon in the above quotation, for instance. But such manuals are nonetheless influential.
It may be less fashionable than it was, but the semicolon still offers a unique semantic option: conveying a closer relationship than is expressed by the period. The writer is telling the reader: I want you to see that these thoughts relate to each other. And when we put it like that, we can see how easy it is for the mark to be misused. There’s a limit to what the reader can take on board at any one time (that is, in any one sentence). We have no problem seeing a semantic relationship between two linked units, or even three; but if a sentence contains four or more, the strain on our comprehension is considerable. We are being asked to see the connection between too many separate thoughts, and we simply cannot do it.
This is one reason why I find it difficult to read certain authors who rely on the semicolon, such as William Hazlitt. Here’s an example from his essay ‘On Poetry in General’ (1818). It’s clear, from the use of the colon after the opening clause, that he sees everything which follows to be semantically linked, but it’s impossible for us to maintain a coherent sense of connection as we read on:
The storm of passion lays bare and shows the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.
Summarize that sentence! We follow the movement of the thought well enough, but any semantic role the semicolon might have had is soon lost, and we end up treating the mark as if it had no more value than indicating a slightly longer pause than a
comma.
The same sort of uncertainty sometimes surfaces in modern novels. Here’s the opening paragraph of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (in its 1959 revision):
‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
Waugh seems to be trying to convey a stream of memories, but it’s difficult to see a principle behind the use of the semicolons to do it, as opposed to using periods after said and summer and a dash or ellipsis dots after before. The semicolons are performing different functions in the same sentence – never a good practice.
These examples illustrate the kind of writing that has led some authors to assert that the semicolon is unnecessary, and to write a book without one, as George Orwell claimed to do in Coming Up for Air (1939). When he returned his proofs to his publisher (Roger Senhouse, of Secker and Warburg), he added:
Did you know by the way that this book hasn’t got a semicolon in it? I had decided about that time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.
In fact, as Peter Davison points out in his Penguin Classics edition, the surviving set of proofs does have three instances, though whether this was deliberate writing or patchy proofreading remains unclear.
There’s a second reason for the suspicion of semicolons which is nothing do with the frequency of their use. Its role, I said above, is to convey a semantic relationship. But what is the nature of that relationship? The primary meaning seems to be one of ‘addition’: we can replace many semicolons by and (or and then). But not all. If I look carefully at the style of a moderate semicolon user (me), we see it conveying a range of other meanings, such as these examples from earlier in this book:
an adversative meaning, where the semicolon would have to be replaced by but or whereas: In one line, they might suggest a pause; in another they might not.
a restatement, where it might be replaced by that is: The whole speech is a series of exclamations; Hamlet isn’t questioning anything.
a result, where it might be replaced by as a result: Only a tiny elite of monks, scribes, and other professionals knew how to write; so there was no popular expectation that inscriptions should be easy to read.
In this last example, the resultative meaning is actually made explicit by the word so.
The consequence of this semantic diversity is that readers are faced with the need to make a decision. Is the semicolon expressing addition, contrast, identity, result, or any other of the meanings that English conjunctions can express? Usually, the context makes it clear. And often the writer who is aware of the issue will reinforce the desired meaning by the use of a conjunction (as I did with so). But a writer who is not aware could easily slip into using a semicolon where it remains unclear what the semantic relationship between the two sentences is. To return to my opening example, what is actually going on behind this sentence?
Smith is going to speak about cars; Brown is going to speak about bikes.
If Smith and Brown are collaborators, the likely meaning is ‘addition’. And we might expand it as follows:
Smith is going to speak about cars; and Brown is going to speak about bikes.
But what if they are rivals or competing for an audience? Now the expansion goes in a different direction.
Smith is going to speak about cars; but Brown is going to speak about bikes.
Smith is going to speak about cars; so Brown is going to speak about bikes.
In short, writers should not react to a semicolon as if it were an isolated piece of punctuation. Its use or non-use should be governed by a sensitive appreciation of its role in relation to the discourse as a whole, in which semantics – not grammar – is the primary consideration. A practice of total avoidance of what can at times be a useful semantic option seems to me to be as counter-productive as the practice of overusing them.
As with other punctuation marks, the semicolon has a range of specialized separating uses, such as in mathematics, where it can mark a boundary between expressions. In computer programming, it usually acts as a statement separator – reflecting its use in grammar. A similar use appears with some email systems, where it separates the different recipients of a message. And it surfaces as the symbol for a wink in emoticons.
In law, it’s taken very seriously. In 2004, in a San Francisco court, a conservative group challenged a statute allowing gay marriage (Proposition 22, Legal Defense and Education Fund). It asked the judge to
cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.
The plea was rejected because of the punctuation. Judge James Warren explained:
The way you’ve written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word ‘or’. I don’t have the authority to issue it under these circumstances.
And he added: ‘That semicolon is a big deal.’
Just how big a deal it can be was also illustrated by one of the most famous punctuation incidents of all time. It took place in France, but it was reported widely in the British local and national press. This is how The Standard (London) told the story in its edition of 7 February 1837:
A duel with small swords lately took place in Paris, between two well known jurisconsults of the Law School, on account of a passage of the Pandects. The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm. His adversary maintained that it should be a colon, and quoted in support of his opinion the text of Trebonius.
We might expect the two marks to have been equally matched, as they function at roughly the same level in the punctuation hierarchy. But the colon won, it seems.
Interlude: Semicolonophilia
The repeated semicolonophobia of writers like Kurt Vonnegut has brought an equal and opposite reaction, and prompted a profusion of metaphors. In The Vocabula Review (July 2009), Janet Byron Anderson described it as ‘the mermaid of the punctuation world – period above, comma below’. And in a New Yorker article (19 July 2012), Mary Norris reports a viola-playing friend describing the semicolon as ‘a comma with vibrato’. Virginia Woolf would approve. As would Mrs Albert Forrester, in Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘The Creative Impulse’. She’s described as having ‘a humour of punctuation’:
in a flash of inspiration she had discovered the comic possibilities of the semi-colon, and of this she had made abundant and exquisite use. She was able to place it in such a way that if you were a person of culture with a keen sense of humour, you did not exactly laugh through a horse-collar, but you giggled delightedly, and the greater your culture the more delightedly you giggled. Her friends said that it made every other form of humour coarse and exaggerated. Several writers had tried to imitate her; but in vain: whatever else you might say about Mrs Albert Forrester you were bound to admit that she was able to get every ounce of humour out of the semi-colon and no one else could get within a mile of her.
In the New York Times (18 February 2008) there was an article about an anti-litter ad that had been seen on a New York subway train, which included the lines:
Please put it in a trash can;
that’s good news for everyone.
The use of the semicolon received widespread (and largely positive) publicity, and made headline news:
Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
Several expressions of support have appeared in newspapers and online. In 2008, US lexicographer Erin McKean set up a Semicolon Appreciation Society. There is a Facebook page: Great Moments in Semicolon History. Innumerable chests are covered by T-shirt designs that applaud the semicolon. And I’ve seen several variants of the message: Keep Calm.
23
Colons: the chapter
After all the fuss surrounding semicolons, colons offer us a more relaxing encounter. Many people have loved or hated semicolons; but not so many develop an emotional relationship with colons. There are some colon T-shirts, but I don’t often see people wearing them. Perhaps it’s because of the word’s ambiguity. A slogan to ‘look after your colon’ is more likely to be about cancer than punctuation.
When the colon arrived in English at the end of the sixteenth century, writers and printers had a clear idea about how to use it. As described in Chapter 6, they placed it within a hierarchy of pauses, expressing a silence shorter than the period but longer than the semicolon and comma. This is more or less how it’s used in Shakespeare’s First Folio (there’s quite a lot of variation among the typesetters), such as in these examples from Hamlet:
To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune;
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye to sleepe …
We see the problem in the last line. Every modern edition would replace that colon by a period, and start a new sentence:
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep …
From a rhetorical point of view, the colon in that line had exactly the same pausing value as the one in the opening line. And as long as pronunciation ruled punctuation, it would have been interpreted in that way. It didn’t matter what the constructions were on either side of it. The important thing was the length of the pause. So we see it followed by a new sentence (above), and also by parts of sentences, such as a phrase, repeated words, and even single words:
Making a Point Page 18
