Confessions of a semicolon lover
The NY Times salutes a subway notice demonstrating the proper use of the semicolon. Apparently it’s all too rare a sight nowadays; this bit of punctuation is generally considered an archaic has-been.
Well, I protest; I must confess right here and now that I love the semicolon. Also, I might add, the liberal—did I just say liberal?—use of the dash. And I’m utterly addicted to parenthetical observations (they’re so very useful when one has the sort of ideaphoria for which bloggers are famous).
No, the semicolon is king; how else to separate those related-but-connected thoughts (note that I’m rather fond of the hyphen, as well)? Or that string of objects that follow each other but are bunched in groups: spices such as pepper, cinnamon, and cloves; herbs such as parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (and by the way, are you going to Scarborough Fair?).
So, my friends, revive that semicolon! Let it not die; use it well and use it often.
[ADDENDUM: And while we’re at it, let’s stamp out the creeping use of the apostrophe before the s in “its” when used as a possessive; it’s clear that the apostrophe has its proper place in the contraction for “it is.”]
I over use commas, and am ashamed of myself for it.
Ah! the semi colon…a mythical beast in my writing but one I will pursue.
My husband’s formulation for the proper use of the apostrophe with “it” goes like this: “It’s is is not, it isn’t ain’t, and it’s it’s, not its, if you mean it is. If you don’t, it’s its. Then too, it’s hers. It isn’t her’s. It isn’t our’s either. It’s ours, and likewise yours and theirs.” He’s pretty sure he learned it from his mother.
“Let it not die; use it well and use it often.”
Go beyond….
Use it; early; and use; it; often.
Use it; often and well should be the use of it: semicolons and its from it is it’s.
In the NYT article I noticed this:
The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”
I nearly spit my Coke all over my monitor, bursting out laughing. Was this The Onion? Was Sam Roberts poking fun at the old Gray Lady? Is poor sad old Noam so obsessed he can’t diverge from his rant to say a kind word about the mother tongue? Was Sam laughing his ass off that, no matter the topic, Noam just can’t get his neurons to fire unless he’s busting Bush’s chops?
Ah, those sacred institutions of NY.
(From the Northern ‘burbs of Chicago: home of the Chicago Tribune, Richie Daley, and dead voters…)
*smile*
Semicolons, dashes, and correctly-hyphenated words . . . yes! Now I recognize another reason I enjoy your writing, Neo; you have an exact understanding of hierarchical relations, and how to show them in text, in part with semicolons, dashes, and hyphens.
Their use is a part of effective writing; being able to write an understandable memo, much less paper, has been the basis for many a successful professional career. Most successful writers learn to do so, I suspect, by voluminous reading as children. Certainly English Departments have been little or no help these past 50-some years.
One English Professor is (was?) an exception, and in her book even explains how to use hyphens, a skill none of my English Professor acquaintances could explain for me.
Tichy, Henrietta J. 1988. Effective Writing for Engineers, Managers, Scientists, 2nd Edition.
A new copy from Amazon costs $150, but would be cheap at twice the price for many I have worked with. A used copy can be had for $10 or less.
In my mid-’60s, 1st edition, and in the available 2nd edition, Tichy starts each chapter with an epigraph that illustrates various writers’ difficulties. One, from Alice in Wonderland, remains in my memory, though probably garbled:
“How awful!” blurted the King. “I’ll never forget it!”
“Yes you will,” said the Queen, “if you don’t write yourself a memo.”
And, Tichy is the only English Professor I’ve know to be candid as to why many have writer’s block, can’t get started: They have nothing to write about.
Which reminds me of a gay systems joke.
What’s the favorite gay MS-DOS command?
C: enter
I apololgize.
The _New York Times_ piece explains it all, no?
Those of us who grew up with the idea that there were some absolutes in the universe understood that most of them were to be found in grammar. There were real, tangible entities such as dependent and independent clauses, and they had to be handled with the required modes of punctuation–in the same way water had to be carried in buckets or pans and not sieves, or drunk from glasses and cups rather than from toilet bowls. (Drinking from toilet bowls was on a par with run-on sentences.)
Now _The New York Times_, once a paragon of grammatical morality, explains the disappearing semi-colon as a mere matter of cultural whimsy. If the semi-colon ever served functions required by dependent and independent clauses, that is beneath the notice of the Gray Lady these days. In her present view, the use of the semi-colon was always more of a personal, rather vague feeling about more or less related ideas, or whether to pause or not to pause–for relative effect, I suppose.
But it could be the old Dame knows better, but aids and abets her readership dumbed down by absolute relativism. She certainly owes them that much.
Amen! And let’s not forget the once-famous – but now too-little used – “three-dot” style of journalism (as performed by Herb Caen)!
David, I believe you mean the ellipsis…
With texting and IMing, the proper use of the semicolon is the least of our worries regarding the English language.
Grammar, punctuation, (deep sigh)… Oh you’re so good!!
I bet you diagrammed sentences for the fun of it. I did.
Rugh H: Were you gazing over my shoulder in sixth grade? Yes indeed, I loved to diagram sentences.
I still feel nervous whenever the first word after a semicolon is a proper noun and must be capitalised. It just seems wrong. I usually reword the entire sentence to avoid it.
Hell – at this point I’d be happy if people would just get ‘lose’ and ‘loose’ in the proper places.
I thought that I was alone in my adoration of the semicolon!
Although I must admit, my personal pet peeve of grammatical faux-pas (what’s the plural for that?) is the sudden absence of the passive voice. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say “Coffe needs brewed,” or “My house needs painted.”
I’m fond of the (now almost entirely defunct, except in Laurie King books of Sherlockiana) use of full sentences, with punctuation, inside parentheses. Thusly, misquoting from memory:
Love it. My thinking is so often parenthetical in pattern – loops and loops of ideas, non-linear and probably confusing from the outside – that loads of parens and phrases set off by dashes are my only available strategy.
Jamie: How refreshing! Could it be you were named after Henry James?
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I hate to say it, but the problem with “it’s” and “its” has cropped up in English newspapers more often than I care to count. I first noticed this common grammar mistake a few years ago while reading The Times. No editor had caught it on the editorial page; now no editors catch the mistake if it shows up multiple times.
Washington DC seems to have more than its fair share of speakers who use “myself” neither reflexively nor intensively but in place of a subject pronoun; e.g. John and myself are hosting the party.
Q2600, I wonder if that’s a colloquialism unique to your region. In my area, we say “The house needs painting”, but that’s grammatically correct.
Semi-colons are well-used in many computer languages, and with mostly the same meaning as ordinary English. So their use is not dying out for lack of grammatical familiarity.
A practice I developed some years ago while writing engineering specifications was to carefully use commas, colons and sem-colons. This allowed the specification to be written in human-readable English, yet parsable with Perl when being slurped into a database. For instance: “Yada: a) yada, b) blah, c) etc.”, was a single requirement. Alternately, “Yada: a) yada; b) blah; c) etc.” is parsed to three separate requirements: concatenating the preface with each list item separately.
I also found that between schedule demands and working with a team of people each with different writing styles, it’s difficult to produce a specification that conforms to a single syntactical and prose standard. This forces us to KISS, and write requirements that don’t contain embedded lists. Just short and sweet “The thing shall meet the performance shown in Table 3.2.2”.
I think the sem-colon is used less because our whole reading experience has changed. We read short ephemeral writings on a computer screen. Proper use of a semi-colon creates sophisticated prose that doesn’t fit well with the digital age. Our lives are in a hurry: we don’t have or won’t make the time to acquire and appreciate the nuances that semi-colons draw out. If this keeps up, we’ll all be writing and speaking Globish.
I love them too.
re: semicolon
Bravo, huzzah, and pip pip! I love it. It’s (contraction) not only good for separating related groups in a comma-connected string of words but also a sort of half-breath if one were speaking instead of writing. Not a period whole-breath or a comma slight pause, but, just like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right.
But I was exposed to Tristram Shandy at an impressionable age.
I really like your blog. I just became aware of it yesterday. Like your picture, too. Always liked Magritte. Symbolic and wildly fanciful at the same time.
Your blog really is a treat. I have it set up to “feed” automatically to my home page. A treat because people so often don’t know what they’re doing anymore and so do what they do that much more earnestly. I just read a post where a person said that the NYT had been hung up by its (no apostrophe) own petard. Apparently hearing the “hoist” in the phrase the writer assumed that a petard was some kind of crane or winch and used a cable to lift things.
I knew a fellow in New Orleans who got a lot of things like that wrong, but he also couldn’t spell his own name. Intelligent fellow, quite savvy, but just couldn’t read. Once I asked him something and he replied, “mo debbly!” Once somebody said “most definitely” and he heard it a little differently and having no way to check he just said what he heard. On him it fit in with his sort of benevolent highwayman personna, but it’s a little dismaying when somebody writing for lots of pay makes a mistake like that and nobody catches it, which happens a lot now.
So good for you. There are probably fewer college seniors who know about the no-apostrophe-for-the-possessive-it than can walk to an unlabeled map and point to the Caspian Sea.