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

by Cecelia Watson

Uncertain of punctuation’s proper classification, some grammarians simply left it out of their books entirely, sidestepping the problem of making rules that would be appropriate for an observation-based, natural science of language.

Most grammarians considered it perfectly acceptable to link together an independent and a dependent clause, so that the parts of the sentence sitting on either side of the semicolon didn’t have to be able to stand on their own grammatically, each with a complete subject and verb.

But by his own admission, Fowler was the exception rather than the rule: by the time he published his book, grammarians were treating the semicolon like a controlled substance. They generally prescribed them only for use between independent clauses, or to separate items in a list that were long enough to be subdivided with commas.

One hundred and thirty years had passed between Robert Lowth’s grammar, which had envisioned punctuation marks as musical elements in prose, and this report, with its strict logic-based rules. In that time, the function of the semicolon had grown narrower and narrower until it had been whittled down to one or two applications.

The Globe had good reason to raise the specter of a punctuation-related legal battle; the new rule-based approach to punctuation had already begun to trouble the court system. Now it was not just the letter of the law but the punctuation separating those letters that judges and juries had to negotiate.

Finding the rules unhelpful, the public had run screaming in the opposite direction, punctuating willy-nilly. Therefore, the commentator opined, either the court system should write a legal treatise to define punctuation marks once and for all, or it should resolve to ignore punctuation altogether in its rulings.

“The lawyer brushed the dust off of [an] old statute, and there he found the semicolon—a dangerous, disastrous semicolon that would have been absolutely harmless, so far as the purposes of the wrangling Fall River citizen had been concerned, if only it had been a comma, which it wasn’t.”

Standing in front of the justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the bar owner’s lawyer argued that the semicolon in the law “was meant to be and should be construed, as a matter of fact, of being a comma”; and because the bar was situated inside a hotel, the Innholder exception should therefore apply, because if the semicolon were construed as a comma, then the clause excepting Innholders would negate all the rules stated in the statute.

The original comma had been swapped to a semicolon when several years’ worth of Massachusetts statutes were consolidated into one volume in 1880. Those consolidated statutes were presented to the Massachusetts legislature in 1881 and enacted with the semicolon in place.

The consolidated version of the laws had been written by Justice Charles H. Allen, who, The Boston Globe observed, “seemed to take a good bit of enjoyment out of the whole matter.” Allen had been transcribing from a copy of the original laws. Allen’s copy of the laws was therefore twice removed from the original, and it turned out the semicolon had slipped in when some unknown person had created the intermediate copy from which Allen worked.

Now it was up to the Massachusetts Supreme Court of 1900 to resolve the discrepancy between how the law had been “found” and how it was presently “given.” Their task was complicated by the fact that they had two opposite precedents they could use to justify their decision. On the one hand, there was precedent for calling the punctuation in a law determinative if it could “throw light” on the meaning of the law.

Years before this semicolon reared its head in Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court itself had weighed in on punctuation in a case that involved not going out for bourbon, but bringing home the bacon: when some pigs escaped from a farmer’s pen one night and a neighbor found and boarded them for several days, the two men got into a dispute over whether the law required the owner of the pigs to reimburse their rescuer for room and board, and a comma in the relevant statutes played a key role in the case.

That court reached a conclusion that was moderate in theory, but challengingly ambiguous in practice: “Marks of punctuation may not control, but may aid in arriving at the meaning of the law.”

The Court* unanimously sided with the semicolon. The justices’ first rationale for their decision was numerical: even though the original law had been passed with a comma, the revised and semicoloned law had been reenacted repeatedly by the legislature.

Police were ordered to start enforcing the newly unearthed law immediately. Chaos descended on Boston. The public was outraged, hotel owners were outraged, and liquor distributors were outraged. Almost immediately, everyone who had an interest in the sale of booze began organizing in order to appeal to the state legislature to alter the statute on the very first day it was back in session. Accordingly, a bill to amend what had become popularly known as the “Semicolon Law” came before the Massachusetts senate in April 1901.

This attitude turned buying alcohol into a kind of competitive sport: Bostonians raced to get to restaurants as early as possible, staked out tables, and then tried to “order up the whole wine list” so that they would be adequately provisioned for the entire night. The poor souls who dared to go to the theater before dinner thus found it nearly impossible to find a seat in a restaurant after the show let out—and even if a seat could be found, the latecomers would have to settle for alcohol-free “temperance drinks,” since by that point all the booze was sold out and making its way down the eager throats of the people who had gotten to the restaurant right at opening time.

Every Saturday night, the whole of New England “bore a distinct resemblance to the Fourth of July,” the commentator added. Commuter trains serving the region were standing-room-only, stuffed to the gills with drunks of all descriptions.

In 1904, the committee proposed a revised law that would allow innkeepers to sell alcohol until midnight, but would prevent them from going back to selling all night long, as they had done before the Semicolon Law was unearthed in the first place. This revision would mean that the statute would return to its original 1875 form, with a comma instead of a semicolon. Arguments both for and against were impassioned.

In February 1905, the Liquor Law Committee convened a group of “friends and foes of the semicolon” to discuss the law. For neither the first nor the last time in history, a bunch of men sat around in a room fretting that given a taste of any kind of freedom (in this case, in the form of liquor), women might ride off the rails of decency.

If “liquor dealers” were allowed one extra hour to sell booze, a Baptist minister testified, it would “cause the downfall of dozens, scores, yes, even hundreds of young women in an increased degree.” The Reverend came by this opinion from having visited second-class hotels and “dance” halls—but these visits to questionable establishments, he hastened to add, were made purely from “a humanitarian standpoint.”

Finally, after years of fighting, the legislature passed the proposed amendment, which was then put to a popular vote on December 11, 1906. The people of Massachusetts approved. This delighted the mayor of Boston, John F. Fitzgerald,* who saw the amended statute as a victory for “good sense and progressiveness” over “provincialism.”

The troubling questions of interpretation and intent that the Semicolon Law dredged up still haunt our justice system. Twenty-first-century legal thinking on the question of punctuation is ostensibly just an amplified version of the competing principles the Massachusetts Supreme Court weighed as it wrestled with the Semicolon Law case. “The modern Court recognizes that grammar and punctuation often clarify meaning,” allows a 2010 guide to statutory interpretation. Yet in determining a statute’s “true meaning,” “the Court remains reluctant . . . to place primary importance on punctuation”—and no wonder, when there is ample precedent for invoking centuries-old English law that asserts that “punctuation is no part of a statute.”

Taking it even further, courts have opined that “punctuation is no part of the English language.”

In Ohio, a woman gets out of a parking ticket because of a forgotten comma. In the Philippines, the result of a mayoral election is voided because the court chooses to disregard a “semi-colon which the appellant views with a respect bordering on fetishism.”* Cases like these are a dime a dozen.

Men have lost their lives as a result of punctuation, and it has not always been the presence of a punctuation mark but sometimes its yawning absence that has troubled the legal system.

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.

When the case was heard by the Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey, all but two members of the court voted to uphold the death sentence. Their votes reveal a jaw-droppingly willful blindness to facts that ought to have spared Merra.

Brandeis, perched in his classic Cape house overlooking Oyster Bay River in Massachusetts, reviewed the documents but declined to grant a writ of error. Merra went to the electric chair three days after marrying the mother of his two-and-a-half-year-old son a few feet away from the death chamber.

The moral of Merra’s story is that no matter how precise you are with your punctuation, and no matter how carefully constructed the legal rules for punctuation use and interpretation might be, there will almost always be a way to cast doubt on the origins of a punctuation mark, or on its original intended meaning, or on its most valid construction given its context.

The clemency committee was headed by then-president of Harvard University Abbott Lawrence Lowell, whose career highlights included a stint as an official of the Immigration Restriction League, and the enforcement of segregation on the Harvard campus.

It’s tempting to ask, too, if the enforcement of the Semicolon Law had something to do with anti-Irish sentiments in Massachusetts, where the Irish were stereotyped as (among other things) drunks.

So many discrete racist or otherwise 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.

In The Merchant of Venice, it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky ideal of mercy that tips figurative scales of justice, but the threat of real flesh tipping real metal scales that determines the outcome of the trial.

But no matter how technically precise and careful, the law will always be subject to interpretation. It is often the case that more than one interpretation of the letter of the law is available to us, so that justices disposed to keep bars open or close them down could both find a rationale for doing so. The same was true of the justices disposed to save or kill Salvatore Merra.

To imagine that the law is safe from the biases of one’s time—be they the prejudices of sixteenth-century Venice, or twentieth-century New Jersey, or in our courtrooms today—is a dangerous dream.

Any time interpretation is involved (which really means: any time a human being gets involved in anything), there is the opportunity for our best and most beautiful qualities to inflect the material we are interpreting—but there is equally the opportunity for our cynicism, our racism, and our little hatreds and bigotries to be exercised through the application of laws that are at the end of the day inert tools that must be wielded by someone to construct a more or less merciful world.

In the same year the Massachusetts Semicolon Law was repealed, 1906, the Chicago Press published a two-hundred-page style guide called Manual of Style. Unlike the grammar textbooks of the nineteenth century, this book was not for schoolchildren, but for authors, editors, and proofreaders. Shift in audience notwithstanding, the Manual inherited both the nineteenth century’s predilection for rules, and its worries about trends.

The sixteenth edition of the Manual (1026 pages, 37 comma rules) carried these principles still farther away from that “subjective element”: the preface announced that the book would “recommend a single rule for a given stylistic matter rather than presenting multiple options.” Exceptions were eliminated where possible. This was what the Manual’s users wanted, though it’s unclear whether firmer and more numerous rules really reduced uncertainty, if The Chicago Manual of Style’s popular “Chicago Style Q&A” web page is any indication.

Harun Küçük, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tells me that the semicolon is used in Turkish and Arabic too, and that writers in those languages aren’t any less confused about its usage than writers in English are.

Humorist Mark Twain wasn’t averse to a “golly” or two in some of the dialogue in his books, but for anyone who dared to interfere with his punctuation, he had stronger words. “The damned half-developed foetus!” Twain raged to his U.K. publishers Chatto & Windus. Once again, Twain was excoriating a proofreader, a professional figure who frequently met with his wrath.

Twain noted that his punctuation was “none of [the proofreader’s] business,” and reminded his publishers that he “knows more about punctuation in two minutes than any damned bastard of a proof-reader can learn in two centuries.”

“Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me,” he wrote in another letter, “& I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”

I’ve found that the Masters are the people who are most resistant to the demonstrable truths about rules (the truths you’ve been reading in this book). The Masters are the people who usually don’t really need to refer to the rules in order to use them, and in fact they never needed to memorize the rules in the first place in order to deploy “proper English.”

As soon as I was on the other side of the seminar table standing at a chalkboard, my gleeful grammar-nerdery crashed headfirst into a pretty serious pedagogical problem: rules, even when explained very carefully and consistently, didn’t seem to be a good way to teach students what they wanted to know, which was how to have control and mastery over language.

Maybe the Masters can speak “standard English” and maybe they can write well enough in obscure jargon and byzantine syntax to be published in some niche academic field, but that might be the only English they can speak—and that is a limitation and liability.

I use [the semicolon]. I’ve no feelings about it—it’s just there. People actually get worked up about that kind of thing, do they? I don’t fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life or a proper job. They’ve got too much time on their hands, to think about nonsense.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge lavished praise on the literary mastery displayed by Daniel Defoe for his use of a semicolon in Robinson Crusoe—a semicolon which, it turns out, doesn’t appear in the majority of editions of the book.

His face was white with sudden fright, And his syntax lily-livered. “O dear Miss Mutch, leave down your crutch!” He cried in thoughtless terror. Short shrift she gave. Above his grave: HERE LIES A PRINTER’S ERROR.

Reading Chandler’s essays, there can be no doubt that he knew how to use a semicolon and relished using them, given their relative frequency in his nonfiction. So why is it that his fiction might contain one or two semicolons, if any at all?* The key, as I hinted at the start of this section, lies in Marlowe’s character. Marlowe rarely allows himself either the kind of reflective pause or the uncertainty that a semicolon permits.

Good punctuation, whether it reins in or lets go, can produce the same kinds of exhilarating effects if we aren’t unwisely reined in ourselves by a sense that language is somehow obliged to a set of rules.