Semicolon
Page 3
This bad news for the colon was excellent news for the semicolon, however. It was the semicolon that writers substituted for its unstylish progenitor, and the semicolon soon surged through sentences at such a pace that it gobbled up not just most of the colons but a large share of commas as well. The semicolon had gotten so fashionable by the 1840s that Goold Brown leveraged its appeal to implore writers to reconsider the now-neglected colon. “But who cannot perceive,” begged Brown, “that without the colon, the semicolon becomes an absurdity? It can no longer be a semicolon, unless the half can remain when the whole is taken away!” Brown pointed out that there was really nothing wrong with the colon anyway; after all, he argued, colons, too, were “once very fashionable.” (Brown himself was not, however, immune to the seductions of the semicolon: the first sentence of his massive grammar compendium contained seven of them, and nary a colon.)
Although Brown appealed to fashion in his plea for the colon, his argument offered a glimpse into the future of punctuation—the future we’ve inherited—in which logic reigns supreme in guides to punctuating. By the time that grammatical great H. W. Fowler published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, in 1926, Brown’s halves and wholes and absurdities had been pressed by Fowler into sterile language reminiscent of a reductio proof in mathematics, a curtly logical formulation in which neither fashion nor taste nor passion nor prosody had any part:
The use of the semicolon to separate parallel expressions that would normally be separated by commas is not in itself illegitimate; but it must not be done when the expressions so separated form a group that is to be separated by nothing more than a comma, or not separated at all, from another part of the sentence; to do it is to make the less include the greater, which is absurd.
The semicolon had been transformed: before the 1800s, it had been a pause. By the early 1800s, grammarians began to describe these pauses as means to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax, with its prosodic and musical features secondary. By the mid-1800s, guided by a new generation of grammarians, grammar was tiptoeing towards a natural science model, deriving its rules from observation of English and teaching those rules to students through exercises in which they would be guided to make the same observations and draw general conclusions from them in the form of rules.
This process of moving from particular examples to general principles is known as “induction.” Faced with the shift towards an inductive method modeled on science, midcentury grammarians waffled on the proper place of punctuation in their guidebooks. Was punctuation part of orthography, the study of how a language should be written? Was it part of prosody, how language should sound? Or did punctuation fall under the heading of syntax, the study of how language should be structured? The problem sparked vigorous debate. If punctuation were to be part of prosody, how could it be taught with the properly scientific inductive method? A student could hardly be expected to inductively derive rules from the rich, subtle, and infinitely varied rhythms that punctuation created in texts!
Uncertain of punctuation’s proper classification, some grammarians simply left it out of their books entirely, sidestepping the problem of making rules that would be appropriate for an observation-based, natural science of language. Where punctuation was included in mid-1800s manuals, however, writers were given ample opportunity for semicolon use. In George Payn Quackenbos’s 1862 An English Grammar, four possibilities for semicolon usage were given, and students were instructed to use a semicolon (not a colon, as we moderns would) to introduce a list of items.
Quackenbos’s rules for the semicolon
Most grammarians considered it perfectly acceptable to link together an independent and a dependent clause, so that the parts of the sentence sitting on either side of the semicolon didn’t have to be able to stand on their own grammatically, each with a complete subject and verb. If the author thought it sounded right, no need to meddle. As grammarians’ push towards logic, natural science, and induction continued, however, punctuation became decoupled from prosody and personal preference. By the 1880s, grammarians distinguished between rhetorical pauses, which were akin to pauses in speaking and were not to be marked by punctuation; and grammatical pauses, which required punctuation in order to make the structural and logical attributes of a sentence clear.
There were a few holdouts who resisted the new model of grammar. W. C. Fowler, for instance, advocated applying punctuation marks to signal rhetorical pauses, and in his 1881 grammar, it was still permissible to use a semicolon between an independent and a dependent clause. But by his own admission, Fowler was the exception rather than the rule: by the time he published his book, grammarians were treating the semicolon like a controlled substance. They generally prescribed them only for use between independent clauses, or to separate items in a list that were long enough to be subdivided with commas. An 1888 report on punctuation by the California State Board of Education called attention to the fact that there was “but one use of the semicolon” in its lessons, its function restricted to separating independent clauses that contained commas. One hundred and thirty years had passed between Robert Lowth’s grammar, which had envisioned punctuation marks as musical elements in prose, and this report, with its strict logic-based rules. In that time, the function of the semicolon had grown narrower and narrower until it had been whittled down to one or two applications.
This narrowing, as we’ve seen, happened in large part because grammar books were part of greater cultural and aesthetic trends in the Western world that privileged natural-scientific knowledge above other types of study; and in responding to those pressures, grammarians devised systems of punctuation that fit comfortably with the ideals and the formats employed in science textbooks. Where had a century of rules, of grammars labeled “true” and “real” and “improved,” of grammars sidling up to natural science—where had all this gotten the generations of Americans who had grown up immersed in books devoted to these principles? Into trouble, that’s where, according to commentators. “Where is the man that can tell why a comma is inserted instead of a semicolon; a semicolon, instead of a period; a colon, instead of a period?” asked an 1899 newspaper editorial. “And yet, the science of punctuation is almost as definite as the science of mathematics, and, with few exceptions, a reason can be given for every mark inserted.” The rules were definitive, and yet their application varied wildly, and this divergence was apt to haunt a person all his or her life. As The Boston Daily Globe somberly intoned,
From childhood’s earliest hour, or from that early hour in which one graduates from pothooks and hangers, and his wavering hand begins to form scraggly letters, those mysterious little hieroglyphics that must be placed somewhere in every sentence confront him, and confuse him, and all through his natural life get him in trouble. Then, perhaps, after death his heirs will call each other names and invoke the courts of law because he were indiscreet enough to use a comma where he should have put a semicolon.
The Globe had good reason to raise the specter of a punctuation-related legal battle; the new rule-based approach to punctuation had already begun to trouble the court system. Now it was not just the letter of the law but the punctuation separating those letters that judges and juries had to negotiate. Another commentator, for The Indianapolis Journal, concurred: citing four specific instances in which the semicolon had “made trouble in the laws” by creating ambiguity in statutes, the author ascribed this trouble to “inability to fix the function of the semicolon.” Old grammar books had given the rules of punctuation in terms of pauses, and “if those who have been writing rules for punctuating compositions had stopped there, we would not have had all this trouble, but these teachers have been going on making new rules for years until no one can undertake to follow them, but each punctuates according to his pleasure, rather than his familiarity with the rules.” Finding the rules unhelpful, the public had run screaming in the opposite direction, punctuating willy-nilly. Therefore, the commentator opined, either the c
ourt system should write a legal treatise to define punctuation marks once and for all, or it should resolve to ignore punctuation altogether in its rulings.
But unbeknownst to the commentator, the court system had already given the latter strategy a try. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had issued a ruling saying that punctuation had no part in statutes. This attempt to assert that Justice ought to extend her blindness to commas and semicolons was overoptimistic, and didn’t obviate any of the interpretive problems with which the law had to contend. Any remaining hope that the law could somehow escape the challenges posed by punctuation went out the window when a semicolon set about wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor in a dramatic Massachusetts court case that caused six years of controversy in courtrooms, in legislative debates, and in the streets.
IV.
Loose Women and Liquor Laws
The Semicolon Wreaks Havoc in Boston
In late November 1900, a spat broke out in Fall River, Massachusetts. “It was an unimportant, picayune sort of a personal quarrel,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “but it has had results of the greatest and most widespread importance.” The beginning of the story sounds like the start of a cornball joke: a man walks into a bar at 11:10 P.M., sits down, and orders himself a drink. The bar owner, knowing that the man has been patronizing a rival hotel bar, decides to spite him by refusing him his drink even though other patrons are still being served. Like any perfectly reasonable American denied a cocktail, the patron threatens to sue; and on the following day he makes good on his threat by retaining the services of a lawyer. “The lawyer brushed the dust off of [an] old statute, and there he found the semicolon—a dangerous, disastrous semicolon that would have been absolutely harmless, so far as the purposes of the wrangling Fall River citizen had been concerned, if only it had been a comma, which it wasn’t.”
The statute the lawyer uncovered read: “That no sale of spirituous or intoxicating liquor shall be made between the hours of 11 at night and 6 in the morning; nor during the Lord’s day, except that if the licensee is also licensed as an Innholder he may supply such liquor to guests who have resorted to his house for food and lodging.” Pointing to the part of the statute preceding the semicolon, the lawyer filed an injunction against the Fall River hotel bar owner to prevent him from selling between 11:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. A local judge granted the injunction, whereupon the bar owner appealed the decision to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Standing in front of the justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the bar owner’s lawyer argued that the semicolon in the law “was meant to be and should be construed, as a matter of fact, of being a comma”; and because the bar was situated inside a hotel, the Innholder exception should therefore apply, because if the semicolon were construed as a comma, then the clause excepting Innholders would negate all the rules stated in the statute. In support of his argument, the lawyer pointed out that when the law was originally passed, in 1875, it had contained a comma where the semicolon now intervened.
LAW AS ORIGINALLY PASSED
“SEMICOLONED” LAW
That no sale of spirituous or intoxicating liquor shall be made between the hours of 11 at night and 6 in the morning, nor during the Lord’s day, except that if the licensee is also licensed as an Innholder he may supply such liquor to guests who have resorted to his house for food and lodging.
That no sale of spirituous or intoxicating liquor shall be made between the hours of 11 at night and 6 in the morning; nor during the Lord’s day, except that if the licensee is also licensed as an Innholder he may supply such liquor to guests who have resorted to his house for food and lodging.
The original comma had been swapped to a semicolon when several years’ worth of Massachusetts statutes were consolidated into one volume in 1880. Those consolidated statutes were presented to the Massachusetts legislature in 1881 and enacted with the semicolon in place. But the 1875 parchment original of the law, the barman’s attorney insisted, clearly showed a comma, making the whole debacle an error of transcription.
Some further digging revealed, however, that the transcriptionist wasn’t the culprit. The consolidated version of the laws had been written by Justice Charles H. Allen, who, The Boston Globe observed, “seemed to take a good bit of enjoyment out of the whole matter.” Allen had been transcribing from a copy of the original laws. Allen’s copy of the laws was therefore twice removed from the original, and it turned out the semicolon had slipped in when some unknown person had created the intermediate copy from which Allen worked. But that wasn’t to say that Justice Allen didn’t tinker with the laws he was transcribing. The Globe pointed out that the transcribers openly acknowledged they had made some tweaks: “It is expressly stated . . . in the preface to the commissioners’ revision of the statutes that while they have in some instances changed the phraseology, there was no intention on the part of the commissioners to change the law, but that they intended to give it as they found it.”
Now it was up to the Massachusetts Supreme Court of 1900 to resolve the discrepancy between how the law had been “found” and how it was presently “given.” Their task was complicated by the fact that they had two opposite precedents they could use to justify their decision. On the one hand, there was precedent for calling the punctuation in a law determinative if it could “throw light” on the meaning of the law. On the other hand, there was equal precedent for ignoring punctuation entirely: in an earlier ruling the court had decreed that “punctuation may be disregarded.”
Years before this semicolon reared its head in Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court itself had weighed in on punctuation in a case that involved not going out for bourbon, but bringing home the bacon: when some pigs escaped from a farmer’s pen one night and a neighbor found and boarded them for several days, the two men got into a dispute over whether the law required the owner of the pigs to reimburse their rescuer for room and board, and a comma in the relevant statutes played a key role in the case. “The cause of all the trouble,” explained The Boston Daily Globe, “was 10 hogs who strayed away from their comfortable, quiet sty one night, broke into the fields of literature, and became hopelessly entangled up with adverbs and commas.” That court reached a conclusion that was moderate in theory, but challengingly ambiguous in practice: “Marks of punctuation may not control, but may aid in arriving at the meaning of the law.”
This slippery principle was captured as best it could be in the Massachusetts liquor law decision. The Court* unanimously sided with the semicolon. The justices’ first rationale for their decision was numerical: even though the original law had been passed with a comma, the revised and semicoloned law had been reenacted repeatedly by the legislature. The semicolon had survived plenty of votes over the years, whereas the comma had only passed once. Further, the most recently published version of the statutes had given the law a title that seemed consonant with the meaning suggested by the semicolon: “An Act to prohibit the sale of spirituous or intoxicating liquors between the hours of eleven at night and six in the morning.” Here the Court once again veered away from the original version of the law, which had no such title.
Police were ordered to start enforcing the newly unearthed law immediately. Chaos descended on Boston. The public was outraged, hotel owners were outraged, and liquor distributors were outraged. Almost immediately, everyone who had an interest in the sale of booze began organizing in order to appeal to the state legislature to alter the statute on the very first day it was back in session. Accordingly, a bill to amend what had become popularly known as the “Semicolon Law” came before the Massachusetts senate in April 1901. Senator Fitzgerald of Suffolk argued in favor of the amendment, contending that “the proposition before the senate was to place the law as nearly as possible where it was when it was first enacted.” But fellow Suffolk senator Mr. Howland argued that the Supreme Court had been correct in looking to the title of the statute to discern the legislature’s intent, and he opposed the amendment. Senator Huntres
s of Middlesex, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn what the intention of the legislature had been: the question was whether the proposed amendment was “better for the general welfare of the whole community” than the Semicolon Law, and he reckoned it wasn’t. A vote was taken, and the amendment failed 21 to 10. The semicolon stood.
The predicament in Massachusetts began to attract national attention. A commentator for The Washington Post, covering the situation on the ground in Boston, wryly noted that the Semicolon Law was now “well known throughout the country, owing to the great wailing and gnashing of teeth from this Commonwealth.” Bostonians weren’t about to kowtow to “misfit commas and semicolons,” and enterprising drinkers quickly found ways to exploit loopholes in the enforcement of the Semicolon Law. If liquor wasn’t going to be sold after eleven o’clock, then why not just buy as much liquor as possible before the cutoff? There was no rule that said you couldn’t go on drinking the booze after eleven. This attitude turned buying alcohol into a kind of competitive sport: Bostonians raced to get to restaurants as early as possible, staked out tables, and then tried to “order up the whole wine list” so that they would be adequately provisioned for the entire night. The poor souls who dared to go to the theater before dinner thus found it nearly impossible to find a seat in a restaurant after the show let out—and even if a seat could be found, the latecomers would have to settle for alcohol-free “temperance drinks,” since by that point all the booze was sold out and making its way down the eager throats of the people who had gotten to the restaurant right at opening time.