Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

How did the semicolon, once regarded with admiration, come to seem so offensive, so unwiel

How did the semicolon, once regarded with admiration, come to seem so offensive, so unwieldy, to so many people? Asking this question might seem academic in all the worst ways: what practical value could there be in mulling punctuation, and in particular its history, when we have efficiently slim guidebooks like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and thick reference volumes like The Chicago Manual of Style to set straight our misplaced colons and commas? We have rules for this sort of thing! But rule-based punctuation guides are a relatively recent invention.

Courts of law, too, were in a lather over how to deal with punctuation marks: a semicolon in an 1875 legal statute caused all of Boston to fly into a panic when courts opined that the semicolon meant that alcohol couldn’t be served past 11:00 P.M. (Bostonians, ever resourceful, devised some pretty clever ways to get drunk well into the wee hours until the statute was finally revised six years after it went into force.)

I wouldn’t deny that there’s joy in knowing a set of grammar rules; there is always joy in mastery of some branch of knowledge. But there is much more joy in becoming a reader who can understand and explain how it is that a punctuation mark can create meaning in language that goes beyond just delineating the logical structure of a sentence.

A particularly heart-wrenching case that was tried on the cusp of the Great Depression painfully illustrates the problems that can be caused by a missing semicolon. In 1927, two men were convicted of murder in New Jersey.

The jury’s verdict and sentencing recommendation was written as follows: “We find the defendant, Salvatore Merra, guilty of murder in the first degree, and the defendant, Salvatore Rannelli, guilty of murder in the first degree and recommend life imprisonment at hard labor.”

The judge interpreted the life imprisonment recommendation as applicable only to Rannelli, since that recommendation followed only the repetition of “guilty of murder in the first degree” after Rannelli’s name. Using this reasoning, the judge sentenced Salvatore Merra to death for the same crime.

In an eleventh-hour appeal, Merra’s lawyer (and New Jersey senator) Alexander Simpson argued that the jury meant the life imprisonment recommendation to apply to both men—otherwise, the jurors would surely have used a semicolon to separate their verdict on Merra from their verdict on Rannelli, so that the verdict would have read: “We find the defendant, Salvatore Merra, guilty of murder in the first degree; and the defendant, Salvatore Rannelli, guilty of murder in the first degree and recommend life imprisonment at hard labor.”

The prosecution, on the other hand, countered that the jury clearly intended for Merra to die.

{...}it doesn't necessarily mean that the decision of the court was motivated by bigotry. It could be coincidence. But such coincidences deserve our attention and our vigilance. So many discrete racist or other malignantly biased acts can be excused as meaningless matters of happenstance, just as a puzzle piece looks like an abstract blob of nothing until hundreds of them are assembled all together and then suddenly—we see.
—p.84

{...}my friends James Harker and Paul Fessa decide that the semicolon is "the California stop of punctuation."
—p.95

There's an extent to which your analysis of your own work is an interesting jumping-off point for criticism, but there's equally an extent to which your writing is its own entity and exists independent of you and your intentions and your hopes and dreams.
—p.105

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.

—From Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, on p.128.

Although it would be a mistake to chalk up to mere performance King's stylistic choices and his careful cultivation of a distinguished intellectual family tree{...}
—p.165

Where Wallace sees moral high ground lush with the fruits of knowledge, I see a desolate valley, in which the pleasures of speaking "properly" and following rules have choked out the very basic ethical principle of giving a shit about what other people have to say.
—p.170

Rules, considered as frameworks within which to work rather than as boundaries marking the outer limits of rhetorical possibility, might spur creativity, just as a poet might find it productive to work within the strictures of the sonnet form. But we would be making a big mistake to teach the only “legal” way to write poetry is to write sonnets. The same goes for punctuation rules.
Perhaps this will be some balm for the souls of some of you who, in spite of the story told in this book, still feel attached to The Elements of Style or Fowler or whatever your preferred grammar tome might be.