Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon?


The following article appeared in The Dallas Morning News, June 29, 2008.

Paul Collins: Has modern life killed the semicolon?

When The Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law professors dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted The Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."

French passions over the semicolon are running high once again, after an online publication's April Fool's hoax claimed that the government planned to demand "at least three semicolons per page in official administrative documents."

French commentators blame the semicolon's decline on everything from "the modern need for speed" to the corrupting influence of English and its short, declarative sentences. It's a charge leveled for years stateside, too.

Has modern life killed the semicolon?

The semicolon has a remarkable lineage: Ancient Greeks used it as a question mark; and after classical scholar and master printer Aldus Manutius revived it in a 1494 font set, semicolons slowly spread across Europe. Though London first saw semicolons appear in a 1568 chess guide, Shakespeare grew up in an era that still scarcely recognized them; some of his Folio typesetters in 1623, though, were clearly converts.

Back then, the semicolon wasn't for interrogation or relating clauses; punctuation was still largely taught around oratorical pauses. The 1737 guide Bibliotheca Technologica recognizes "The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell [count] one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four."

Lacking standards for how punctuation shades the meaning of sentences – and not just their oration – 18th-century writers went berserk with the catchall mark.

But the chaos couldn't last: By the 1793 New Guide to the English Tongue, modern usage peeks through – "Its chief Use is in distinguishing Contraries, and frequent Division."

Semicolons hit a speed bump with Romanticism's craze for dashes, for words that practically spasmed off the page. Take this sample from the 1814 poem "The Orphans": "Dead – dead – quite dead – and pale – oh! – oh!"

By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of "the rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors."

1865? But surely that's a century off: Isn't modern life to blame?

Not exactly: From the 1850s onward, it's virtually impossible to find anyone claiming a prevalence of semicolons in writing. We now lived, complained a critic in 1854, in a "fast era" that neglected punctuation.

Indeed, a 1995 study tallying punctuation in period texts found a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.

Researcher Paul Bruthiaux notes that the steepest semicolon drop-off came in the mid-19th century. Technology is a leading suspect in rapid aesthetic shifts, so consider what debuted in the 1850s that might radically change language usage: the telegraph.

Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion. Punctuation was charged at the same rate as words, and their high price – trans-Atlantic cables originally cost a still-shocking $5 per word – meant that short, punchy lines with minimal punctuation were necessary among businessmen and journalists.

By the new century, simplified punctuation migrated into textbooks; one 1903 guide recommended that "boys and girls ... should as a rule use a period when they are tempted to use a semicolon."

Harper's could decry the semicolon as "almost forgotten among proofreaders" in a 1924 article titled "Our Passion for Haste." So, too, in 1943, when The Times editorialized against "the war that is being waged in some quarters on the semicolon."

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "all they do is show that you've been to college."

Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that "the most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is."

Yet semicolons serve a unique function, so it's tempting to think some writers will always cling to them.

When grading undergrad final papers recently, I found a near-absence of semicolons, save for one paper with cadenced pauses and carefully cantilevered clauses that gracefully stacked upon one another, Jenga-like, without ever quite toppling. Yet English was not this student's first language.

He was an exchange student – from France.


Paul Collins teaches nonfiction at Portland State University. His e-mail address is pcollins@ pdx.edu. A version of this essay first appeared at Slate.com.

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