Wednesday, August 20, 2008
;.....;....?
Andrew Sullivan is one brave blogger; he has broached the matter of the semi-colon. I know Nige has strong feelings about this - he is very much in favour. He finds it, as I recall, an even more total cessation than a full stop. I have strong feelings also, but of inferiority. Someone - a teacher, I presume - once said to me, 'Not really at home with the semi-colon; are we?' and I have never fully recovered. Lately, with considerable effort, I have begin to use them with some frequency; they seem to come almost naturally at last. Yet I still fear Kurt Vonnegut's description of them as 'transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing' as well as the charge that real men neither eat quiche nor use semi-colons. In the end, however, the semi-colon is like death; we must all face it alone.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I like semi-colons because they make my writing sound like I do when I talk: a pause rather than a full stop; a slight turn in the conversation, not a new topic. But what I really love -- I mean, really, really love -- are dashes. I believe I must be descended from Emily Dickinson, she of dash and dammerung.
ReplyDeleteMy life, a loaded gun. BLAM!!!!!
PS: I always get Andrew Sullivan mixed up with Andrew Solomon. Solomon wrote "The Noonday Demon," a good book about depression. Now, Sullivan... Weekly Standard writer? Who is he; remind us, Bry? (That's an example of a sentence where the semi-colon doesn't work. The question mark needs to come after the first clause; what I did was grammatically correct but stylistically flawed.)
ReplyDeleteIts half a digestive tract or something aint it?
ReplyDeleteJohn O'Sullivan writes for the National Review (?) Susan- and is an expat British conservative; Andrew Sullivan was, or maybe still is, another British conservative of younger vintage who writes in Atlantic Monthly where he also has a blog.
ReplyDeleteEmily Dickinson! Imho, a lightweight compared to Byron (letters) in the dash department, he of dash, dammerung and dolcezza.
ReplyDeleteNot a fan of the semi-colon here, except in technical writing. The occasion does make one think, though. Why am I try to conjoin two ideas? Are they really linked? Perhaps I am writing faster than I am thinking and should look at another way into this. Etc.
I remember when we were selling my mother's house, we were looking though the particulars written by our estate agent.
ReplyDeleteThere was two tricky sentences that didn't flow well so my sister suggested to the estate agent that he use a semi-colon.
When I next saw the estate agent a few days later, he was really excited. "We haven't used a semi-colon in any of our particulars for years", he said, "but that is such a good solution"!
A semi-colon is somewhere between a gasp and a sigh and I couldn't live without them.
ReplyDeleteYour final sentence really should use a colon instead of a semi-colon.
ReplyDeleteI like them; I use them; and I'll use yours if you're not using them.
ReplyDeleteThat last sentence is like my grandfather: missing a colon. It is not like my uncle; he has a semicolon.
ReplyDeleteDespite Cormac McCarthy's contempt for semi-colons (he reckons you hardly need any punctuation if you write properly in the first place), i find semi-colons useful. i use them a lot at work, though i suspect the physios whose notes i turn into letters don't quite know what they are, but never mind, that's part of why i use them.
ReplyDeleteI've given up all punctuation except for full stops and hyphens - I find the latter more than adequate and less prone to censure.
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ReplyDeleteNot to be pedantic, but I believe the punctuation mark which so many are referring to as a "hyphen" is properly an em dash. A hyphen is used to join words; an em dash is used to demarcate parenthetical statements, or to ruin dialogue with.
ReplyDeleteI would just like to say about the England football performance last night:
ReplyDeleteMeet the new boss; same as the old boss.
I suppose we need to decide how 'rule bound' we want to be with our punctuation. And then to the extent that we want to be, to establish the rules. Its a question of what purposes they serve.
ReplyDeleteTo me, a comma breaks up a sentence in varying ways for varying reasons. A semi-colon keeps the same subject but does a new thing with it, but not such a new thing that you want a new sentence. Perhaps it gives it a new direction or slant. A dash delares something that exhibits what you had said (similar to brackets), while a colon introduces more formally a statement that echoes or builds on what you'd just said. Or something like that. Its all meant to help the reader know better than otherwise what you are up to, I suppose.
I wouldnt say its something to obsess over much about, for the sake of the mere question of form in-itself
I propose that we go the route of proto-fascist Wyndham Lewis and insert arbitrary and fanciful punctuation into our writing to achieve a more "painterly" style. Enough of this rule-bound business.
ReplyDeleteActually my problems with punctuation are actually with eyesight - I can't find the d****** ****-****** on my ******* keyboard anymore.
ReplyDeleteOr read the word verification.
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