Any Good Books, October, 2019
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and
Future of a Misunderstood Mark
Cecelia Watson (Ecco, 2019)
It's characteristic of the
thoroughness of Cecelia Watson's research that the she knows both the
date of the semicolon's invention (1494) and the name of the
inventor, a Venetian publisher; the type designer was Bolognese. The
humanists of the Renaissance were busy inventing marks, most of which
quickly faded out of use; the semicolon survived because of its
utility as a way to mark a pause, longer than the one marked by a
comma, and shorter than that of a colon. In other words, its use was
purely a matter of prosody, the music of language.
From the middle of the eighteenth
century through the nineteenth century, grammarians contended to
publish the most thorough explications of English grammar, and the
most 'scientific'. The competition was fierce; one dauntless scholar
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 1852 printing of his own book.”
Some authors based their grammatical theories on Latin and Greek;
others attempted logical induction directly from English. They all
had much the same difficulty: “how could it be possible to give
useful rules for punctuation, while at the same time acknowledging
that those rules couldn't describe every valid approach to
punctuating a text?”
But it was ever thus: ambiguity creeps
in through the cracks. Watson has a couple of chapters about legal
situations where the rules were
asked to carry more weight than they really could bear. “Any
remaining hope that the law could somehow escape the challenges posed
by punctuation went out the window when a semicolon set about
wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor in a dramatic
Massachusetts court case that caused six years of controversy in
courtrooms, in legislative debates, and in the streets.” Six years!
She
has another couple of chapters about the stylistic uses of the
semicolon. Herman Melville wrote in the nineteenth century, the
semicolon's golden age. “No,” says Watson, “it's not really
that Melville uses the semicolon to stretch out the distance between
a capital letter and a period; instead, the semicolons are in the
service of carrying you slowly, gently, pleasurably away from
whatever it was you thought you were reading about–the process of
beheading the whale, or how to assess winds, or cannibalism.”
In
the hands of the modern essayist Rebecca Solnit, on the other hand,
“A semicolon is sometimes not a pause, but the opposite: an
instrument of quickness, a little springboard that launches you
rapidly from thought to thought.” These observations return the
semicolon to the realm of music. The punctuation may, incidentally,
accord with The Chicago
Manual of Style, but
it was chosen for its rhythm.
Watson
is not opposed to rules, exactly, but she is opposed to idolatry
about them. For one thing, as we've seen, they had to be invented.
For another, they can make no claim to completeness, because the
language is always flourishing in new ways. As language changes, we
imagine that it decays, because the rules of our youth pass out of
fashion; in reality, though, “[t]here was no time when everyone
spoke flawless English and people punctuated 'properly.'”
She's
also opposed to the pernicious snobbery by which those of us who
happened to grow up speaking the dominant dialect ascribe some kind
of moral virtue to following the rules. “Rules can be an easy, lazy
way to put the onus on someone else: if you make a grammar mistake
while trying to convey something heartfelt, I can just point out that
you've used a comma splice and I'm excused from confronting what you
were saying, since you didn't say it properly.” Don't be that
person. Communicating is better than standing on privilege, any day.
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