So, did I really need to buy Cecelia Watson's treatise on the semicolon, titled quite simply, 'Semicolon, The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark'? You betcha.
I like to think if Robin Williams were still alive he'd comment; 'Semicolon, what's left after major abdominal surgery." I guess I'll have to say it for him.
Ms. Watson appropriately takes us back to the "invention" of the semicolon, hard as it is to believe that a punctuation mark can have an invented origin. It started in Venice, 1494, and was concocted by Aldus Manutius, a printer and publisher, who believed something was needed between the pause of a comma and the full stop of a period. Thus, the hybrid mark was born. Never really thought of it that way. "Hey you, almost a period."
Little did Aldus know, but he was instrumental in creating the alphabet for Millennials. The semicolon gets more use in making faces than gracing sentences. Especially when "Sent from my phone" appears in the message.
Ms. Watson is obviously scholarly. She has an under grad degree from St. John's College (Cambridge) and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She has taught at Bard College.
'Semicolon' is bit hard to read. It's not a funny romp across the keyboard. It's filled with footnotes, some of which wrap around to the next page. The book, I think, is purposely small and designed to be somewhat in size to 'Elements of Style'.
Amazingly, punctuation has humorously played a role in enforcing early turn-of-20th-century liquor laws in Massachusetts, and not so humorously in someone being sentenced to death. Boy, there's a typo with a punch.
Despite being a bit difficult to absorb the text and the footnotes, there are some terrific nuggets inside. Did anyone know there was once a rhetorical question mark?
The rhetorical question mark, punctus percontativus, Latin of course for percontation, was a product of the zeal in 16th century Europe to introduce more punctuation marks. It was developed by Henry Denham and was written as a reverse question mark to be used when the sentence does not require an answer.
Thank God its use died out. Can you imagine having to try and find that one on your iPhone? I never took Spanish, but I know they still start a sentence that is a question with an upside down question mark in order to notify the reader that a question is being asked. I always thought this was a bit silly, as well as awkward to write an upside character. Are you talking to me?
Writers are inherently rebels, so there should be no surprise that Mark Twain would get pissed off at proofreaders and copy editors when he submitted his manuscripts.
Ms. Watson, a thorough scholar who spent 10 years diving into ancient grammar books tells us:
Mark Twain, famously defensive of his right to punctuate exactly how he wanted to, purportedly grew weary of criticism of his sometimes unconventional choices and published a piece pf writing that was wholly without punctuation marks, but with a string of commas, semicolons, and other marks at the bottom of the text, along with a note telling the reader to put them where he or she pleased..."
Imagine that. A manuscript from Ikea.
He also famously wrote a threat to his printer about his proofreader.
"Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer's proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray."
And lest you think that's just a grumpy old man in a white suit in the 19th century who has a familiarity with firearms, consider what I once read in reply to a letter I wrote to Russell Baker when it seemed the NYT had embarked on a style policy of eliminating the hyphen from hyphenated words, making one long awkward looking spelling.
The letter is from 2001 and sits framed next to this computer.
I surrendered to hyphen idiocy years ago before I left the Times...they're a product of internetaddresstalk.gabble...When one of these appears I think you can be excused for shooting on sight without asking questions.
Ms. Watson claims her affinity for paying attention to punctuation and making a career out of the historical study of language, began when she was young and got "embarrassingly loud hiccups on a school field trip when I was 12 years old because poor grammar on a sign at a national park offended and shocked my constitution on such a visceral level I could hear the crack of an infinitive splitting from miles off." She surely grew up different than most children,
She reveals in a footnote the faux pas was "an errant apostrophe making an its into an it's. Imagine mummy and daddy getting a call from the chaperone that poor Cecelia has been stricken with what...punctuationitis? and is resting comfortably in the nurse's office. Some kids just scrape their knees. Poor mummy and daddy.
Russell Baker, like many writers, feels there is a need to punctuate. At least loosely. In 2006 in a weekend piece for the NYT, he wrote quite elegantly, "when you write, you make a sound in he reader's head. It can be a dull mumble—that's why so much government prose makes you sleepy—or it can be a joyful noise, a sly whisper, a throb of passion...One of the most important tools for making paper speak in your own voice is punctuation."
And Ms. Watson as much tells us this in that the use of a semicolon is related to style, an author's style of writing.
Samples from several writers are used to illustrate the author's use of this most elusive of punctuation marks. There are writers like Kurt Vonnegut who claimed its use just showed "you went to college." I think Benjamin Dreyer tells us he wouldn't be caught dead using them because they are ambivalent. They are meant to join two independent clauses. They are meant to join two sentences. Which is it? The hell with it.
Certainly you can get through life without ever using a semicolon, but perhaps not after reading Ms. Watson. A recent book review in the Wall Street Journal by Barton Swaim on Ms. Watson's book tells us of his liking to use semicolons so much that the books editor "of this newspaper once asked me if I buy my semicolons individually or by the boxful."
Certainly Herman Melville unloaded semicolons from a clipper ship. I remember reading 'Moby-Dick' twice, once as a high school assignment, and then once more after high school. The semicolons must have made a huge impression on me because when I handed an audit report in to my manager I apparently used so many semicolons that she remarked, "what's with all the semicolons?" I smugly thought to myself, hell, she didn't read 'Moby-Dick', did she?
Ms. Watson writes of Melville at some length, and tells us there are some "four thousand-odd semicolons, sturdy little nails holding narrative thread spread out wide enough to comprehend not just a whale but everything the whale comes to mean to the men hunting it."
Cecelia's not so bad herself at using the colon, (she went to grad school) the stop just shy of a period. Russell Baker in his article on punctuation calls the colon "a tip-off to get ready for what's next: a list, a long quotation or an explanation. This article is riddled with colons."
Think you have to read highbrow stuff to see semicolons used properly? My favorite piece of reading material can be the Daily Racing Form when I'm in racetrack mode.
There is a section called 'A Closer Look', thumbnail sketches of the writer's thoughts on the chances of an entrant being worth, or unworthy of consideration. The Form used to provide a 'Closer Look' analysis for all the entrants for every race. Some time ago they cut back, and only provide it for selected races, the higher priced stake and allowance races, rather than the cheaper claiming races. They have to pay their stable of writers for the blurb, and in the end, everyone wants to cut a corner here or there.
Different writers are contracted to write about the races the Form is willing to provide the 'Closer Look' for. The blurbs, probably because of the editor, are all sprinkled with semicolons. Take an example from the 1st race on August 14, a jump/steeplechase race.
Snap Decision
Has never been worse than second over the fences and collected stylish maiden victory at Monmouth on the Fourth of July; the switch to front-running after two second-place finishes and can be dangerous if left alone; most likely will have some company on the lead; Phipps-bred lacked speed on the flat.
Semicolon perfect.
Even though the going can be a bit dense, there is a reasonable amount of humor. Ms. Watson even gets a little potty-mouth and lets a "fuck" and a "shit" slip into the footnotes. It's as if she lets her red Rita Hayworth locks down and gets in with Hillary Clinton at a West Virginia miner's bar slinging back beers and shots.
Jimmy didn't go, and I didn't finish. Even if I ran into an instructor looking like Ms. Watson I was probably not going to stay. I read an obit for perhaps the best of all obituary writers, Robert McG. Thomas Jr. that told us he went to Yale but dropped out "to major in New York." I left twice (not Yale, certainly) to major in going to work and making money.
And speaking of Breslin, the Bard from Queens, when I read Mr. Swaim's review in the WSJ I was still considering if I wanted to buy Ms. Watson's book. I was curious if she included the note from Son Of Sam who wrote to Breslin at the Daily News.
I explained that Son of Sam was a serial killer in 1977 who terrorized NYC and was often referred to as the '.44 Caliber Killer.' He taunted the police and the public by writing letters to Breslin at the Daily News. A copy of one of the letters appears at the top of this posting. Attention needed to be paid.
I explained to Mr. Swaim that Breslin commented after reading one of the letters that he never knew a serial killer who knew how to use a semicolon. It takes all kinds.
The image above might not be the best, but it's available on Google, and it clearly shows that when you read the second visible paragraph, 7th line, you see "...to rest; anxious to please Sam. An impressive use of a semicolon from a serial killer.
Given that block handwriting, did the killer go to Catholic school? Turns out, no. David Berkowitz grew up in Co-op city in the Bronx, a massive housing project, and was Jewish. He was eventually captured in what is now a text book case of analyzing the parking tickets on cars that were in the vicinity of one of his murders.
The police found a car registered to someone from Yonkers, and wondered why is there someone from Yonkers parked on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn? Of course he could have just been visiting, but the question begged an answer.
On stakeout, David was found to be coming out of his apartment and headed to his car where he had a stash of weapons he was going to use to shoot up a disco in the Hamptons. "Sam" was a dog, or the devil that was speaking to him to do these things. Berkowitz worked a night shift in a post office sorting packages. But not after that.
That was 1977 and in the years that followed there was a fellow at the Blarney Stone where I went after work, who told us he grew up with David in the Bronx. They played together as 12-year-olds. Of course, there was no sign then that he would become the Son of Sam, but the fellow who knew him was Billy Rogers, (Billy Bang-Bang; Billy Plop-Plop after being knocked out) a journeyman light-heavyweight who would come into the bar and hoist a few beers after (or before) his engineer watch shift at an office building. Billy was a gentle soul who may have had 11-12 professional fights. He once fought on an undercard in Nova Scotia and got an $11,000 purse.
He had fists like grapefruits and was once slated for a fight at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum, only to flunk his pre-fight Athletic Commission fight physical due to an ear infection. We never did see him fight.
I was disappointed Son of Sam's literature didn't make it into the book, but then I realized Mr. Swaim said he never heard of the killer, never heard of Breslin even, and admitted to being quite young in 1977. He did his Internet research after we exchanged emails, and did come away with a new found appreciation of Breslin and the low-down on Son of Sam. He did not however appreciate Ms. Watson's book for several reasons.
And as for Ms. Watson, it is now understandable that she never heard of Son of Sam and never heard of Breslin, since she's likely even younger than Mr. Swaim and probably hails from the U.K., even though she has spent time here in the States.
Ms. Watson's penultimate chapter is titled 'Persuasion or Pretension', sub-headed 'Are Semicolons for Snobs'? which if you've been paying attention is a rhetorical question, that centuries ago would have required a mirror-image question mark, ¿. (How's that for research?)
For some reason, Ms. Watson seems to go off on—-really off on—David Foster Wallace, a critically acclaimed writer who was chronically depressed and hung himself at the age of 46 in 2008.
I remember the obit, and I remember it meant little to me because frankly, I had never heard of the guy. Apparently, he was considered a great literary talent who liked to write somersaulting, freight train-length prose. And why wouldn't he¿ He was born when his father was a philosophy graduate student and his mother was an English teacher who was a grammarian.
I remember reading the obit, and after reading seven names—only one of which I heard of—in Bruce Weber's own, and typical cantilevered lede (Bruce certainly went to college), I knew David Foster Wallace was someone literary. Cementing the proof was that the first person quoted in the obit piece was the NYT chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani (herself a daughter of a famous Japanese mathematician), who said "David Foster Wallace can do practically anything if he puts his mind to it."
His mind however was deeply depressed, and David was on medication for decades, coming off it shortly before he committed suicide.
Despite being dead now for nearly 11 years, and in tragic circumstances, Ms. Watson rips him a new one.
It's an attitude in keeping with Wallace's self-proclaimed snobbery. He was profoundly a snob—or, as he called it, a SNOOT*, an acronym Wallace's family used for "somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it...Where Wallace sees high moral ground lush with the fruits of knowledge, I see a desolate valley, in which the pleasures of "speaking properly" and following the rules have choked out the very basic ethical principle of giving a shit about what other people have to say.
*Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance
(Do your own lookups)
Whew! He must have used a lot of semicolons.
Or course the semicolon is not only for snobs. You never know when you might want to make your writing have a lasting impression.
Just ask David Berkowitz. He's still in jail.
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