how beautiful is a semi-colon?
How beautiful, indeed, is the hyphen in "semi-colon"? How lovely is an apostrophe, how bewitching a pair of parentheses? I think the semi-colon is the most beautiful of all, like Snow White with personality.
Apparently the French are up in arms about the possible loss, brought on I'm araid by us, the brutish Anglo-Saxons, of the lovely little point-virgule. It is a shame; I personally have always loved the semi-colon for being the most elegant, most subtle and expressive punctuation mark. I'm glad the French media are discussing this. We over here seem to be only too happy to chuck everything away with both hands, and the baby and bathwater with it.
Jon Henley in the Guardian:
"The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely 'a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought'.
Philippe Djian, best known outside France as the author of 37°2 le matin, which was brought to the cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Beneix as Betty Blue and successfully launched Beatrice Dalle on an unsuspecting world, goes one step further: he would like nothing better than to go down in posterity, he claims, as 'the exterminating angel of the point-virgule'... (Ms B interjects here: I hated Betty Blue and now I know why. The man's a philistine.)
In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - 'the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought'."
Anyway, here from the Guardian are some bagatelles from current perpetrators of written English:
Will Self: "I like them - they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. I like dashes, double-dashes, comashes and double comashes just as much. The colon is an umlaut waiting to jump; the colon dash is teasingly precipitous."
GB Shaw, writing to TE Lawrence on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."
Kurt Vonnegut: "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing."
Gertrude Stein: "They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature."
We in Baroque Mansions disagree with this last: a comma is a sweet enough creature but very common compared to a semi-colon. It is like comparing hot-smoked salmon to tinned tunafish, nice as tinned tuna may be. But after all a Stein is a Stein is a Stein...
;click on the picture
11 comments:
Yes, they are beautiful; and more useful than hot salmon.
I concur; the semi-colon is a wonderful thing. Trust the French - who only have a mere 100,000 words in their language to English's near million - to begin attacking the intricacies of grammar. Hard to believe it's taking place outside the pages of 1984.
This is a wonderful post, full of twinkling erudition and heart-warming semi-colonic tributes.
A whole generation of internet users would be devasted were they to be deprived of their 'virtual wink.' ;)
I agree with Will Self, the more punctuation the better. I used to get very frustrated when writing poetry when I was younger that I couldn't notate it like music. Or something between music and a play.
I especially hate the tendency to omit all punctuation. The question I always come back to is: What is to be gained by not using it?
I love them. They are wicked, addictive things but they create fantastic linguistic opportunities; how wonderful to be able to say one thing and then to say another which is not quite the same.
Comashes and double comashes? Mr Self keep one on one's toes.
Helen DeWitt writes passionately about punctuation here, and refers to the notorious Oprah interview with Cormac McCarthy where he boasts about removing the semi-colons cluttering up sentences by, it might be, Swift...
Not good for the blood pressure. (I used bugmenot to access Oprah's site, BTW)
Most of the editors I deal with have a pathological aversion to commas. Were I to include semi-colons in my copy the result might well be loss of commissions.
Some of my best friends are transvestite hermaphrodites.
Signs, do you really think so? I'm sort of addicted to the stuff lately.
Ben, er - that should be a colon in your first sentence there! The point you make about the vocabulary is very interesting. English is made rich by her vocabulary in the way that, say, Russian is supposed to be made rich by its seven cases, which give word placement an incredible subtlety of tone. You'd think that with such a small (to use the word) word-hoard, the French would particularly value a punctuation mark that adds richness and texture.
Simon, GREAT POINT - and witty! Well done. All that great stuff in my post comes from the Grauniad, so you should really praise them, but thanks.
Jim and the answer is: nothing. But I'm not sure I agree that less punctuation is always better. The Americans, in particular, badly overuse the comma.
Eloise, yes, to say one thing and then something slightly different - that is a boon.
Anne, bugmenot? Is that like Earl grey tea? And as to Cormac McCarthy, I've never succeeded in reading one of his books, but aren't they sort of macho-baroque? Very heavy stuff. Not as if he's exactly all about lightening up. I'd rather read Swift any day.
Mopsa, yes, but he's talking shite. I think those must be , -'s. Comma-dashes. I'm not a fan of that awful colon-dash thing they seem to do in local authority departments. What is that ABOUT?
Francis, that says more about the editors than about the semi-colon. Of cours epopel don;t want messy, run-on sentences full of useless dependent clauses. But on the other hand, if one is trying to develop an argument or do what Eloise says it will be harder to remain coherent with a string of choppy little sentences. Also, with the comma increasingly a catch-all punctuation mark for the middle of the sentence, people seem to think they can use it the same way they use a full stop. A semi-colon would actually make meaning more clear.
Mark, I know, tell me about it. Mine too. I thought that was incredibly vacuous. That's why I put it in.
Also: if a transvestite is dressing as the opposite sex, how the hell can a hermaphrodite even be one? Vonnegut was great, but he was also full of shit.
I’m very, very fond of the semi-colon, despite the fact that few people can figure out how to use it. After all, it doesn’t seem quite as necessary as the comma, which allows you to pause in between your sentences, and the exclamation/question marks that reveal the speaker’s emotions.
The period, of course, needs no mention, given its already star status in the world of grammatical marks.
Anyway, a hoax some time back swirled around the death of the semi-colon; supposedly, Nicolas Sarkozy had initiated a crackdown on the much misunderstood little punctuation mark. By the way, if your eyes are sharp enough, you should have noticed my use of the semi-colon somewhere in the sentences past.
Ever since I learned how to use the semi-colon, it turned into some sort of obsession. I love using the semi-colon; I don’t think I can ever live without it. Some may think that using it is tantamount to some sort of grammatical snobbery, but that’s not true. It’s just addicting. I feel liberated from those pesky conjunction words.
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