‘Fascinating… I loved this book; I really did’ David Crystal, SpectatorA biography of a much misunderstood punctuation mark and a call to arms in favour of clear expression and against stifling grammar rules.Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored.One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it.Forget the rules; you’re in charge. It’s time to make language do what you want it to.
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Cecelia Watson. Semicolon
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Introduction. Love, Hate and Semicolons
I. Deep History. The Birth of the Semicolon
II. The Science of Semicolons. English Grammar Wars
III. Sexy Semicolons
IV. Loose Women and Liquor Laws. The Semicolon Wreaks Havoc in Boston
V. The Minutiae of Mercy
VI. Carving Semicolons in Stone
VII. Semicolon Savants
THE BIG PAUSE
HEROIN ADDICTS EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME
BLUBBER AND BLATHER
TRUST ME, I’M A WRITER
THE LINE AND THE DASH: WHY USE THE SEMICOLON NOW?
VIII. Persuasion and Pretension. Are Semicolons for Snobs?
Conclusion. Against the Rules?
Acknowledgements
Notes. INTRODUCTION: LOVE, HATE AND SEMICOLONS
I: DEEP HISTORY
II: THE SCIENCE OF SEMICOLONS
III: SEXY SEMICOLONS
IV: LOOSE WOMEN AND LIQUOR LAWS
V: THE MINUTIAE OF MERCY
VI: CARVING SEMICOLONS IN STONE
VII: SEMICOLON SAVANTS
VIII: PERSUASION AND PRETENSION
CONCLUSION: AGAINST THE RULES?
Index
About the Author
About the Publisher
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who made sure I always had enough to read
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Morris offered a way to get beyond the deference to Latin and Greek that he believed had made earlier grammarians so error-prone: he advocated observing English carefully, and then making rules based on those observations, rather than trying to squeeze English grammar into frameworks designed for dead languages.‡‡ Grammar rules would then arise directly from scrutinising English in action – and conveniently enough, the study of grammar would thus acquire for itself some of the virtues of the natural sciences that were being championed in the press, where commentators regularly argued that students were inherently inclined towards the observation and study of natural phenomena.
Grammarians had a second strategy to advance against critics who complained about the inferiority of grammar when compared to the natural sciences: the sentence diagram. Any good science textbook had diagrams, and if grammar was to be a science, it surely needed a system of schematic illustrations as well. And so in 1847, a grammarian named Stephen Clark introduced a system of diagrams designed to relate to the ‘Science of Language’ as maps did to geography, and figures to geometry and arithmetic. (It might sound odd to the modern reader to think of geography and geometry as natural sciences like physics and chemistry, but plenty of people back in Clark’s days thought of them that way, and even people who didn’t categorise those areas of study as ‘sciences’ believed the two disciplines were essential for the study of both the natural sciences and other respected fields like philosophy. And, unlike grammar, the mathematical sciences were considered ‘perfect’ and ‘useful’.)
