Semicolon

 

Photograph: A dictionary of modern English usage, by H. W. Fowler. 2^nd edition revised by Sir Ernest Gower (1986).

It has been a mixed year for the semicolon. My casebook records instances of where relationships have broken down irretrievably. For example, A confesses that he has tried using semicolons but can “honestly see no point in them anymore.” This at least shows some effort, unlike B who won’t use the semicolon on principle because it’s outdated and a mark of “a privileged education”. Socio-economic factors inform C’s certainty that she could not have completed her doctoral degree without the semicolon; they “connect concepts and groups into sentences, thus avoiding the scatter effect of multiple sentences with no unifying links.” Likewise, E believes strongly that the semicolon “joins clauses that lack a connecting word or conjunction”, a belief that seems self-evident to E and scarcely worth further discussion; in the same way he sees no point in getting stressed about the Oxford comma. “Just do it and you will avoid litigation.” Unquote. F comes armed with facts. For example, in the past thirty years use of the semicolon in British fiction has fallen by 25%. Worldwide use has dropped by 70% since 1800. She puts this down to social media, which F sees as the root cause of the collapse of punctuation in general. G could fit the description; she has given up all punctuation for the dash, but endures bouts of guilt withdrawal over her “neglect of full stops, commas, and even the semicolon.” The enneagram has not been invented for H, his overdependence on social media training him to add stops wherever it feels right at the time; any stop. His favourite is the semicolon because it’s just right there in the middle of the keyboard. I is into conspiracies, believing Silicon Valley plans to do away entirely with stops, replacing them all with a universal slash. The casebook records strong emotions about the semicolon. J is hardened to the prospect of the semicolon’s extinction. He is troubled by how he’s done little or nothing to stop this inexorable drift. A semicolon here or there will not change things; he feels as if he’s “perpetuating built-in obsolescence” and people think he’s “dotty.” Sessions with J always have an elegiac air. Others express nothing but love for the semicolon. K is effusive about the “cute little squiggle”, thinks people are missing out who don’t use them, that self-isolation’s no excuse not to “start now on this stop.” Love flows freely for those who treat semicolons as pause managers, “creating their own voice” (cf. L), or turning “mundane prose into a poem of seemingly unconnected lines” (cf. M). Therefore N, a scientist with logophobia of technical terms longer than 20 letters, may confide in practical yet devoted terms that the semicolon is “absolutely fundamental for constructing a flowing argument and drawing a conclusion.” O’s semicolon infatuation has not subsided.