The law is skeletal, a mere naked framework of words, and those words require interpretation for the law to become animate and to act in the world. Any time interpretation is involved (which really means: any time a human being gets involved in anything), there is the opportunity for our best and most beautiful qualities to inflect the material we are interpreting—but there is equally the opportunity for our cynicism, our racism, and our little hatreds and bigotries to be exercised through the application of laws that are at the end of the day inert tools that must be wielded by someone to construct a more or less merciful world. Any other vision of our laws—any vision in which they are perfect and complete and speak for themselves—is fantasy. In most cases, perhaps all cases, there will be an opportunity to act ungenerously, and to let some Salvatore Merra go to the chair, or instead to take the opportunity to choose a more merciful path. Given this reality, there is no easy answer to questions of interpretation in the law, and statutory guidebooks that tell us the “rules of legal hermeneutics” will find that those interpretive rules, much like the rules of grammar books, quickly meet challenges from the complex irreducibilities of the real world. Perhaps the only thing that can be advised is that anyone charged with application of the law—a judge, a juror, a lawyer—should be always encouraging the better angels of our nature, and constantly on the lookout for the worse devils in it.
VI.
Carving Semicolons in Stone
What has been the fate of the semicolon, breaker of Bostonian spirits, and the rules that aimed to bring it to heel? In the same year the Massachusetts Semicolon Law was repealed, 1906, the Chicago Press published a two-hundred-page style guide called Manual of Style. Unlike the grammar textbooks of the nineteenth century, this book was not for schoolchildren, but for authors, editors, and proofreaders. Shift in audience notwithstanding, the Manual inherited both the nineteenth century’s predilection for rules, and its worries about trends. As the Manual put it, “Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.” The Manual presented its rules in numbered form, with nineteen regulations given for the most commonly used punctuation mark, the comma.
The disclaimer about “elasticity” was still being repeated over a century later in the sixteenth iteration of the Manual. It had “become a maxim,” and was enshrined in the preface of every edition of the Manual.* But the rest of the book had changed considerably since it was first printed, with its major revisions pushing it farther and farther along the course initially plotted by those nineteenth-century rule setters. In the thirteenth edition, published in 1982, A Manual of Style became The Chicago Manual of Style, which was “what everybody else calls it,” and an apt reflection of the authority the book had achieved by dominating the market for stylebooks. With the definite article came a shift towards greater definitiveness all around: this was “much more a ‘how-to’ book for authors and editors than was its predecessor.” Still, the Manual at least paid some lip service to taste: “Punctuation should be governed by its function, which is to make the author’s meaning clear, to promote ease of reading, and in varying degrees to contribute to the author’s style.” There was no indication of how punctuation might contribute to style, and writers were warned that rules should be followed to regulate the presence of “the subjective element.”
The sixteenth edition of the Manual (1026 pages, 37 comma rules) carried these principles still farther away from that “subjective element”: the preface announced that the book would “recommend a single rule for a given stylistic matter rather than presenting multiple options.” Exceptions were eliminated where possible. This was what the Manual’s users wanted, though it’s unclear whether firmer and more numerous rules really reduced uncertainty, if The Chicago Manual of Style’s popular “Chicago Style Q&A” web page is any indication. On the site, anyone can write in with questions about how the rules are to be applied, and learn that if the Manual hasn’t got the exact construction they are looking for, they can “extrapolate” from the rules that are given. Meanwhile, in the pages of the current edition of the Manual, authorial “style” has disappeared entirely from the punctuation section; instead, the punctuation rules the Manual gives are celebrated as the “logical application of traditional practice.” Has The Manual of Style lost its sense of style?
Whether it’s the Manual that peers down from your bookshelf, or Strunk and White, or the APA style guide, or Fowler, or Lynne Truss, it’s fair to ask why we consider these books authoritative, and if there might not be some better way to assess our writing than through their dicta. It seems that stylebooks in any language aren’t successfully clearing up ambiguities: Harun Küçük, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tells me that the semicolon is used in Turkish and Arabic too, and that writers in those languages aren’t any less confused about its usage than writers in English are. Other people grope for something better than what’s offered in style guides; over dinner in Berlin, my friends James Harker and Paul Festa decide that the semicolon is “the California stop of punctuation.” Still others obviate the question of semicolon usage entirely: Tim Casey, an abstract painter and writer who grew up in the Southwest, tells me that “in Texas they (we) use the term ‘Golly’ as a universal form of punctuated pause within the clause.” I don’t know if I could get along solely on Gollys, but as I stare down bookshelves bowed under the weight of umpteen conflicting and competing style guides golly is it tempting to give it a try.
VII.
Semicolon Savants
Humorist Mark Twain wasn’t averse to a “golly” or two in some of the dialogue in his books, but for anyone who dared to interfere with his punctuation, he had stronger words. “The damned half-developed foetus!” Twain raged to his U.K. publishers Chatto & Windus. Once again, Twain was excoriating a proofreader, a professional figure who frequently met with his wrath. Ninety percent of the “labor & vexation” of writing, Twain insisted, “consists in annihilating their ignorant & purposeless punctuation & restoring my own.” Affronted by the meddling proofreader, Twain noted that his punctuation was “none of [the proofreader’s] business,” and reminded his publishers that he “knows more about punctuation in two minutes than any damned bastard of a proof-reader can learn in two centuries.” Having satisfied himself that he’d made his point, Twain decided to conserve the rest of his vitriol for another occasion. “But this is the Sabbath Day,” he closed, “& I must not continue in this worldly vein.” The Sabbath cast a short shadow, however; Twain never went long without a dig at the people fussing with his grammar: “Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me,” he wrote in another letter, “& I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”
Twain was aggressive in his criticisms of his proofreaders because he was tuned in to the value of good punctuation.* By “good,” I don’t mean what rule books mean by “good punctuation.” I mean punctuation that is effective, punctuation that is actively making a text better, punctuation that is fit to the tone and style of the text and its purpose. These criteria don’t mean that good punctuation won’t ever appear to play by The Rules—they just mean it’s coincidental if it happens to do so. Punctuation has to be judged by how it shapes the text in which it’s situated. The problem, for writers and readers, is how to go about figuring out whether punctuation is any good or not without the security of a book of rules. It’s a tough thing to do, to learn to let go of getting answers from stylebooks and to replace that practice with asking exploratory questions about our texts.
I’ve spent a lot of years talking about punctuation—its history and its modern practices—with people who consider themselves language Learners (often students), and also with people who consider themselves language Masters (usually people who’ve written a few articles, or a book, or a dissertation). I’ve found that
the Masters are the people who are most resistant to the demonstrable truths about rules (the truths you’ve been reading in this book). The Masters are the people who usually don’t really need to refer to the rules in order to use them, and in fact they never needed to memorize the rules in the first place in order to deploy “proper English.” But they’re very certain, nonetheless, that rules are a good thing. These rule lovers possess an innate understanding of the proscriptions provided by rules; they like rules because the rules give words to, and validate, an instinctive understanding of usage that the rule lover already has. Perhaps this rule lover has had to memorize a few of the more obscure precepts to possess the complete set in his or her head, but the basics have been there from childhood.
I know this character well, because I was that rule lover, that Master. From a young age I could recite Chicago Manual of Style precepts by chapter and verse. I got embarrassingly loud hiccups on a school field trip when I was twelve 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. Why, yes, dear college classmate, I would be delighted to proofread that paper for you and hand it back red.
I skipped smugly along in this fashion, straight up until I taught my first class of college students, when I was twenty-three. As soon as I was on the other side of the seminar table standing at a chalkboard, my gleeful grammar-nerdery crashed headfirst into a pretty serious pedagogical problem: rules, even when explained very carefully and consistently, didn’t seem to be a good way to teach students what they wanted to know, which was how to have control and mastery over language. How do you make words do what you want them to? Rules couldn’t answer that question.
Deep down, I think most rule lovers know this. I have yet to meet a rule lover who’s been able to tell me that he or she actually learned good English usage by memorizing or consulting rules. And even if memorizing rules were a good way to learn English successfully, where would knowing and using all the rules with precision actually get you? You could write perfectly “correct” English all day and still not have what most of us really want, which is style. We want our words to have impact. We want our boss to implement that great new idea, we want our texts to inspire love and our tweets to get laughs, we want the eulogy to do justice, we want to sound breezy and cool in that social media profile, we want the A on the paper, we want to persuade and to be understood. Following the rules will not be sufficient to accomplish these things; some of these abilities elude even the people who consider themselves Masters. Maybe the Masters can speak “standard English” and maybe they can write well enough in obscure jargon and byzantine syntax to be published in some niche academic field, but that might be the only English they can speak—and that is a limitation and liability. So what if you know the password to get into the Ivory Tower if you can’t get back out of it when you need some fresh air and open sky?
So we need another tactic, whether we think we consider ourselves beginners or advanced. How do we learn to use English in a way that sticks better and works better than an abstracted list of memorized rules? And how do we learn to develop a writing style that’s recognizable, and at the same time master the ability to be flexible with that style as the occasion requires?
I would love to give you a quick fix for this problem. If I could give you a quick fix, I could sell a zillion copies of this book the way that a new diet book promising quick and easy weight loss sells in January. But the results of a quick-fix way to master English would be about as lasting as those of a fad diet. The truth is, it takes more work and more time to become a good English writer than anyone really wants to believe. To write well, you have to read a lot, and you have to read with attention, which is what these next sections will model. You’re going to see me stop* and think, Why did the author choose a semicolon here when she could have chosen a period? In some cases, I’m going to look at sentences as parts of paragraphs, which are parts of chapters, which are parts of books: how does this sentence interact with the sentences around it, and how does it create character in fiction or advance an idea or feeling in nonfiction? In other cases, I’ll think about the author’s overall style or voice or themes: how is the semicolon contributing? Here there will be no contextless “example sentences” floating in the void. Thinking that you can understand a semicolon by looking at one in a lone example sentence is like thinking you’ve really seen a lion because you saw one at the local zoo all alone in an enclosure chomping on a T-bone the zookeeper tossed in.
Many of the writers I’ll talk about in the following sections have firm opinions about punctuation, or at least they wouldn’t disavow punctuation as part of what gives their writing style. Irvine Welsh, however—one of the authors I’ll touch on—might not be too impressed with my scrutiny of his semicolons:
I use [the semicolon]. I’ve no feelings about it—it’s just there. People actually get worked up about that kind of thing, do they? I don’t fucking believe it. They should get a fucking life or a proper job. They’ve got too much time on their hands, to think about nonsense.
Well, them’s the breaks if you’re a writer. There’s an extent to which your analysis of your own work is an interesting jumping-off point for criticism, but there’s equally an extent to which your writing is its own entity and exists independent of you and your intentions and your hopes and dreams. Plus, it’s entirely possible that a text might have its punctuation altered by a sloppy (or malicious) copyeditor; as we’ve seen in the chapters on the law, transcription and typesetting are vulnerable to human error. Samuel Taylor Coleridge lavished praise on the literary mastery displayed by Daniel Defoe for his use of a semicolon in Robinson Crusoe—a semicolon which, it turns out, doesn’t appear in the majority of editions of the book. “In effect,” one critic summed up, “Coleridge has chosen to praise the work of a typesetter contemporary to himself, not Defoe.” So in terms of exegesis of a book, there are a lot of unknowns that render it hard to make claims about what an author’s intentions really were. Even without certainty about who did what to which part of a text, we can learn by thinking carefully about punctuation in texts. Welsh can claim indeliberate semicoloning all he wants. It doesn’t make it less interesting or productive to look at how the semicolon creates narrative voice and meaning in Trainspotting.*
THE BIG PAUSE
When we first meet private detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, he is thirty-eight years old and has already seen it all. Marlowe is the consummate noir detective, so hard-boiled that even Diogenes the Cynic might have told him to chill out. In the seven novels and handful of short stories that Chandler wrote featuring Marlowe, semicolons are rare. Often, the world as Marlowe describes it tumbles forth with barely any punctuation at all: “I shaved and showered and dressed and got my raincoat out and went downstairs and looked out of the front door.” Forget the semicolon, we’re not even getting commas.
Ralph Crane/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
A semicolon requires effort and thought to deploy, and as we’ve seen, some writers avoid them entirely. So you might think, Maybe Chandler just didn’t like the semicolon, or maybe he didn’t know how to use one. But Chandler’s essays, sparkling yet far less well-known than the Marlowe novels for which he’s famous, show otherwise; the essays positively bristle with well-used semicolons. Moreover, Chandler was persnickety about syntax in general, and he wasn’t afraid to growl at copyeditors who trod too close to what he considered his territory. Sitting at his typewriter in January 1947, peering through his horn-rimmed glasses and puffing on his pipe—at least, this is how I picture the scene, because you rarely see a photo of Chandler without a pipe jammed between his lips and a glint in his eye—he fired off a salty letter to his editor at The Atlantic, Edward Weeks. “By the way,” Chandler spat at the end of the letter,
would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or he
r that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.
The Atlantic’s proofreader, Margaret Mutch, got Chandler’s message and wrote him a letter back. This time Chandler responded with a poem, “Lines to a Lady with an Unsplit Infinitive,” in which he imagines confronting Mutch over her correctives. The poem culminates in Mutch murdering Chandler with a crutch:
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