Definitely not a semi-colonoscopy – A punctuation protest parade

Given my recent foray into book editing and publishing I have brushed up on punctuation. Using the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), the Wipf and Stock publisher guide, with reference to the classic Elements of Style (Strunk/White), I found both clarity and confusion about how to punctuate my text. Punctuation reduces ambiguity in both pronunciation (when to breathe) and interpretation (how to understand). Most importantly, good punctuation manages pauses, as do rests in music. In both, silence and sound are necessary collaborators.

A period, full stop,stops the sentence. A comma has the reader pause for the next phrase. A full colon points to an idea or to items soon to appear. A semi-colon connects phrases which belong together in sequence. Other pauses include various types of dashes (EM, EN) which set texts apart though within other texts. That’s another blog however.

Special reverence, or disdain it seems, arises around the semi-colon. Writing in the Washington Post, Danielle Kunitz finds that “this punctuation mark is semi-dead; no other bit of punctuation causes such a fuss.” She continues:

No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. What a useful little tool it has been in its primary role of inserting a graceful pause between two related independent clauses, as in: “RFK Jr. came to my house; he tore out the medicine cabinet with a crowbar.”

But now the semicolon is dead. Or semi-dead. Its use has collapsed, as underlined last month by a study from Babbel, an online language-learning platform. “Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” the survey said — and this sudden drop followed a steady decline across the past two centuries . . .

The Babbel analysis touched off a gratifying round of articles in the British press contemplating the semicolon. The Independent: “Our best punctuation mark is dying out; people need to learn how to use it”; the Financial Times: “Semicolons bring the drama; that’s why I love them”; the Spectator: “The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over.” (A secondary function for semicolons is to divide up unwieldy lists; a tertiary function is to help headline writers amuse themselves.)

On Team Semicolon, it turns out, we have Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and possibly Abraham Lincoln. (“I have a great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap” is a line attributed to Abe by a reminiscing journalist in 1878, which is to say: It sounds too good not to quote.) Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the Guardian noted, employed “more than 1,000 [semicolons] to echo its hero’s flow of conscious thought.”

On the Not a Fan side, the flow of conscious thought hating on the semicolon is considerable. “Do not use semicolons,” Kurt Vonnegut advised in 2005. “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” George Orwell: “An unnecessary stop.” (Unnecessary but irresistible, apparently: He used plenty.) Cormac McCarthy: “Idiocy.” . . .

When you have the Little Flower and Kurt Vonnegut, 70 years apart, agreeing that semicolon users are irritating, diploma-flaunting show-offs, what chance does the self-effacing little dot-over-comma have in these populist times? It’s a miracle the Trump administration’s threats to universities haven’t included making federal support for infectious-disease research contingent on the immediate cessation of all semicolon use.

Wipf and Stock, Microsoft, and CMOS all agree that semi-colons are here to stay. Writers must heed certain rules however. In an exchange on a CMOS query page a question about use received the following answer:

Question. My question is about the proper use of semicolons. My editor wants me to use the following construct when I use “that is” or “for example”: “You can tailor much of the desktop environment; for example, the background window.”

Answer. CMOS does not support such use of the semicolon; semicolons—when not separating items in a syntactically complex series—should separate independent clauses: e.g. Deep-dish pizza has anchored me to the Midwest; that is, I’m unwilling to give it up and too heavy to leave.

Works for me. I enjoy using semi-colons. I also enjoy photography and the Toronto Blue Jays when they play well. I do not enjoy colonoscopies. I hope Danielle Kunitz is right in her assessment that “the semicolon will never completely go away.”

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