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

by Cecelia Watson

Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Woof. Not a good look Kurt.

But rule-based punctuation guides are a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 1800s, the majority of grammarians and scholars advocated personal taste and judgment as a guide to punctuating, or “pointing,” a text.

as the 1700s drew to a close, new grammar books began to espouse systems of rules that were purportedly derived from logic.

Milton and Shakespeare were chastised for “gross mistakes,” and subjected to grammarians’ emendations, so that these great authors’ works were made to fall in line with rules established centuries after their deaths.

No one knew which system of rules was the most correct one, and the more specific the grammarians made their guidelines for using punctuation marks like the semicolon, the more confusing those punctuation marks became.

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.)

The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink.

Grammar (in our mythical narrative) is part of the good old days: people used to know grammar properly, we think, the same way they used to walk three miles to school uphill in the snow, and everyone was polite and better-looking and thin and well-dressed.

Self-styled grammar “sticklers,” “snobs,” “nazis,” and “bitches” want so much to get back to that point in the past where the majority of people respected language and understood its nuances, and society at large shared a common understanding of grammar rules. But that place is a mirage.

This book will show you how the semicolon is essential to the effectiveness and aesthetic appeal of passages from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Irvine Welsh, Rebecca Solnit, and other masters of English fiction and nonfiction.

I like Welsh but "master?"

grammar rules, it turns out, began as an attempt to “scientize” language, because science was what parents wanted their children taught in public schools.

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks.

Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages.

One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers.

You might think you see eight, but beware! That semicolonish mark at the end of the fourth line from the bottom isn’t a semicolon, it’s an abbreviation for que, Latin for “and.” In this case, it’s helping to shorten neque, or “also not.” It appears elsewhere in in the excerpt, always filling in the -ue part of a que. If you look closely, you’ll see that the dot-and-curve combination is raised higher up than a semicolon; it’s positioned on the same level as the words in the text because it’s shorthand for a word instead of a signal to pause.

Oh boy

(For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut* disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”)

The humanists tried out a lot of new punctuation ideas, but most of those marks had short life spans. Some of the printed texts that appeared in the centuries surrounding the semicolon’s birth look as though they are written partially in secret code: they are filled with mysterious dots, dashes, swoops, and curlicues.

there was once a punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark, which was a mirror-image version of the question mark.

Why is this not a thing NOW

This isn’t too surprising: does anyone really need a special punctuation mark to know when a question is rhetorical?

YES

But the lament of the French humanists is familiar, isn’t it? People can’t punctuate correctly, eloquence is slowly dying out.

most humanists believed that each writer should work out his punctuation for himself,* rather than employing a predetermined set of rules.

When the topic of punctuation usage came up, a reader was likely to be advised that he should consider the punctuation marks analogous to rests in music, and deploy them according to the musical effect he wanted to achieve.

Goold Brown, schoolteacher and grammar obsessive, had a lofty ambition: he wanted to produce “something like a complete grammar of the English language.” Twenty-seven years after first resolving to undertake this task, he finally published The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection* of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1851 printing of his own book.*

A jaunt through some of the most popular grammar books of the nineteenth century will reveal that their authors were shrewd entrepreneurs taking advantage of a newly developed and highly lucrative market for education in English writing.

although these first professional grammarians sought clarity through rules, they ended up creating confusion, and the semicolon was collateral damage.

Even though Lowth didn’t hesitate to perpetrate brow-raising “corrections” on writers who seem, well, pretty competent, he did still carry with him the legacy of the previous centuries’ emphasis on personal taste and style, and he reserved a place for individual discretion, particularly when it came to punctuation.

The comma thus was a pause shorter than the semicolon, and the semicolon was a pause shorter than the colon.

To say that English Grammar was a blockbuster success is an understatement. The book went into twenty-four editions, reprinted by sixteen different American publishers between 1797 and 1870, and it sold so many copies that Murray was “the best-selling producer of books in the world” between 1800 and 1840.

Where Murray’s grammar had gone into a dizzying twenty-four editions, Kirkham’s went into at least one hundred and ten. Kirkham won over readers by presenting a new system of parsing verbs, and by extending his predecessors’ criticisms of “false syntax” in historical English.

the very first edition of his grammar omitted punctuation entirely, on the grounds that it was part of prosody rather than grammar: in other words, punctuation was all about establishing rhythm, intonation, and stresses.

Thus, for the king of nineteenth-century grammar-book sales, punctuation remained a tool that writers could wield with a good bit of flexibility and discretion.

That nemesis was Goold Brown, the grammar surveyor in whose gargantuan book Kirkham was but one of hundreds of other people plying the same trade. But out of all those grammarians, Kirkham was the one who most got under Brown’s skin. As Brown saw it, Kirkham had played fast and loose with grammar, and cared more about his bottom line than about scientific scruples: he wanted to “veer his course according to the trade-wind,” Brown sniped.

Labeling Kirkham a quack and a plagiarist, Brown tore into his grammar book on page after page, pointing out its logical contradictions and omissions.

Brown and Kirkham may have pitted themselves against one another,* but they (along with their contemporaries) agreed on one thing: grammar was to be viewed not as a mere matter of personal taste or style, but now as a coherent system of knowledge.

To these new grammarians, their field was analogous to the natural sciences. In staking this claim, the new grammarian-scientists were almost certainly reacting to protests from parents of schoolchildren and school officials, who claimed that the study of grammar was boring and ineffectual; pupils’ time was better spent studying the natural sciences, which were exciting and taught real skills.

The grammarians’ solution was rather ingenious: grammar, they proposed, was a method of teaching students the art of scientific observation without requiring expensive or complex scientific apparatus.

Rebel grammarian Isaiah J. Morris emphasized the first approach—careful observation of English—in his 1858 Morris’s grammar. A philosophical and practical grammar of the English language, dialogically and progressively arranged; in which every word is parsed according to its use.*

Kirkham and his ilk had relied on Greek and Latin grammar to come up with rules for English, and as a result, Morris fumed, they had littered the true “laws of language” with “errors” and “absurdities,” which Morris was now left to “expose and explode.”

Grammar rules would then arise directly from scrutinizing English in action—and conveniently enough, the study of grammar would thus acquire for itself some of the virtues of the natural sciences that were being championed in the press, where commentators regularly argued that students were inherently inclined towards the observation and study of natural phenomena.

Any good science textbook had diagrams, and if grammar was to be a science, it surely needed a system of schematic illustrations as well. And so in 1847, a grammarian named Stephen Clark introduced a system of diagrams designed to relate to the “Science of Language” as maps did to geography, and figures to geometry and arithmetic.

Bullions had used outlines to show his readers “leading principles, definitions, and rules.” Those rules were to be displayed “in larger type” to emphasize their importance; and exceptions to the rules were printed in type that got smaller and smaller the further away from an ironclad principle they crept.

Whether a grammarian tried to police English with the laws of ancient Latin and Greek, or instead to derive his principles from examination of contemporary English in action, he could not escape the tension between the rigidity of rules and the flexibility of usage.

The grammarian was necessarily torn between trying (and inevitably failing) to anticipate every kind of usage, as Peter Bullions did with his twenty-five comma rules; or giving rules so general they were scarcely rules at all, the strategy Robert Lowth opted for with his specification that punctuation marks were successively longer pauses.*

Whenever grammarians tried to pin down punctuation marks with rules, they inevitably slipped their restraints, no matter whether they were shackled with a few broad rules or a hundred narrow ones.

As a result of their examination of usage, grammarians became keen observers of the punctuation whims of writers.

By the early 1800s, parentheses were already so last century, inspiring T. O. Churchill’s 1823 grammar to coolly pronounce that “the parenthesis is now generally exploded as a deformity.”

By the mid-1800s, writers were also snubbing the colon: Oliver Felton’s 1843 grammar fobbed it off with “The COLON is now so seldom used by good writers, that rules for its use are unnecessary.”

This bad news for the colon

Hi I am 5

The semicolon had gotten so fashionable by the 1840s that Goold Brown leveraged its appeal to implore writers to reconsider the now-neglected colon. “But who cannot perceive,” begged Brown, “that without the colon, the semicolon becomes an absurdity? It can no longer be a semicolon, unless the half can remain when the whole is taken away!”

The semicolon had been transformed: before the 1800s, it had been a pause. By the early 1800s, grammarians began to describe these pauses as means to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax, with its prosodic and musical features secondary. By the mid-1800s, guided by a new generation of grammarians, grammar was tiptoeing towards a natural science model, deriving its rules from observation of English and teaching those rules to students through exercises in which they would be guided to make the same observations and draw general conclusions from them in the form of rules.