Lincoln, Abraham, 164
“Lines to a Lady with an Unsplit Infinitive” (Chandler), 108–9
London Athenaeum, 126
London Britannia, 129
Los Angeles Times, 159–60
Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 83–84
Lowth, Robert, 25–27, 41–42n, 52
Luther, Martin, 164
Manual of Style. See Chicago Manual of Style
Manutius, Aldus, 14–16
Massachusetts Semicolon Law, 55, 57–70, 73–74, 84
Massachusetts Supreme Court, 55, 58–64, 73–74
Melville, Herman, 125–37
Merchant of Venice, The (play), 84–88
Merra, Salvatore, 76–80, 82, 84, 89
Milton, John, 3, 31, 35n
Moby-Dick (Melville), 125–37
Morris, Isaiah J., 33–36, 41–42n
Morse, W. A., 70
Murray, Lindley, 27–28, 30
Mutch, Margaret, 108–9
Nack, William, 116
Natural science model, 32–39, 49–50, 53–54, 192n
Neque, 15–16
New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, 77–80
New Republic, 1, 2
New York Edition (James), 139–40
New Yorker, The, 128, 132
New York Evangelist, 135
New York Sun, 69
New York Times, 151
Nutting, Rufus, 46
Obama, Barack, 179–80
“Original intent,” 87–88n
Orthography, 49–50
Orwell, George, 1
“Oscar Night in Hollywood” (Chandler), 109–12
Paddy wagon, 84
Parenthesis, the, 46
People v. Huggins, 80–81n
Plato, 164
Politics and power, 167–71
Pope, Alexander, 35n
Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 138n, 141–44, 145, 149–51
“Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt), 161
Practical Grammar, A (Clark), 36–39
Practical Grammar, A (Nutting), 46
“Prescriptivists,” 41–42n
Presidential election of 2012, 179–80
Pretension, 159–61
Principles of Psychology, The (James), 144–45
Proofreaders, 97–98, 108–9
Prosody, 28, 49–51
“Punches,” 17n
“Punctuation Marks” (Adorno), 176
Punctus percontativus, 17–18
Quackenbos, George Payn, 50, 51
Que, 15–16
Rannelli, Salvatore, 76–80, 82
Rhetorical pauses, 13, 51–52
Richards, Robert J., 8, 8n
Robinson, Paul, 1, 2, 159–60, 173
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 105
Roderick Hudson (James), 140–41
Romney, Mitt, 179–80
Sacco, Nicola, 82–83, 83n
Scalia, Antonin, 87–88n
Science-based punctuation, 9, 32–39, 49–50, 53–55
Scribner Publishing, 139
Secretariat (Nack), 116
Secretariat (racehorse), 112–13, 116
Semicolon (racehorse), 113n
Semicolon Law, 55, 57–70, 73–74, 84
Sentence diagrams, 36–39
Shakespeare, William, 3, 84–88, 176
Short Introduction to English Grammar, A (Lowth), 25–27, 41–42n
Simpson, Alexander, 77
Snobbery, 159–61, 170–71
SNOOT, 170–71
Solnit, Rebecca, 117–18, 119–22, 124–25
Sondergaard, Gale, 142–43
Standard Written English (SWE), 166–71
State v. Merra, 77–80, 80–81n
Stewart, Jon, 179–80
Supreme Court, U.S., 61–62, 74, 79–80
Syntax, 49–50, 107
Thoreau, Henry David, 154, 155–56
Trainspotting (Welsh), 106, 117–19
Trends and fashion in punctuation, 45–55
the colon, 46–48
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 48–49
rhetorical vs. grammatical pauses, 51–52
Truss, Lynne, 6, 94, 116–17
Turkish, semicolon in, 94
Twain, Mark, 74–75n, 97–99, 98n
Typee (Melville), 135
University of Chicago, 9
University of Pennsylvania, 94
Usage and rules, 41, 43, 46
Vagueness, 144–50
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 82–83, 83n
Vonnegut, Kurt, 1–2
Wallace, David Foster, 165–71
Washington Post, 64, 65, 70
Weeks, Edward, 108
Welsh, Irvine, 104, 105–6, 106n, 117–19, 161
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 147–48, 148n
Yale University, 9, 175n
About the Author
CECELIA WATSON is a historian and philosopher of science, and a teacher of writing and the humanities. She is currently on Bard College’s faculty in Language and Thinking. Previously she was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Yale University, where she was also a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center and was jointly appointed in the humanities and philosophy departments. Prior to that she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, where she also served as scientific advisor, curator, and moderator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a public center for contemporary arts and culture.
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Praise for Semicolon
“Semicolon is a sly little tome—a book about language rules that’s really a book about the love of language, in all its unruliness.”
—CONSTANCE HALE,
author of Sin and Syntax
“In tracing the history of the semicolon, Watson examines the prose of authors who use the quizzical mark sometimes to produce fine constructions, though often ones that threaten to collapse thought or even tangle with legal statutes. With a diamond cutter’s precision she isolates the beautiful facets and discards the flaws.”
—ROBERT J. RICHARDS,
professor of the history of science, University of Chicago
“Who would have thought that a book about a semicolon could be thrilling? In Cecelia Watson’s hands, what starts as an exploration of the obscure origins of a modest punctuation mark becomes a slyly profound proof of the value of creative freedom itself. Grammar fiends and poetic anarchists alike will find Semicolon inspiring, challenging, and delightful.”
—ADRIAN JOHNS,
Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History, University of Chicago
“Cecelia Watson takes the history and logic of this strange, unbalanced punctuation mark, and with an eloquently natural voice transforms them into a work of sane, funny, and humanistic philosophy; it’s superb.”
—DANIEL MENAKER,
author of The African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings That Make Surprising Sense
“Intimidated by the semicolon? Fear not: Cecelia Watson’s sprightly history is the perfect antidote to punctuation pedantry. It’s also a paean to the music of language by a writer with a silver ear.”
—LORRAINE DASTON,
director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and visiting professor, the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Copyright
Parts of this book were previously published in Critical Inquiry.
SEMICOLON. Copyright © 2019 by Cecelia Watson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the expres
s written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Sara Ridky
Illustrations by Anthony Russo
FIRST EDITION
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Watson, Cecelia.
Title: Semicolon : the past, present, and future of a misunderstood mark / Cecelia Watson.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045968 (print) | LCCN 2018056939 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062853073 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062853059 | ISBN 9780062853066 | ISBN 9780062917935 | ISBN 9780062917942
Subjects: LCSH: English language—Punctuation. | Semicolon.
Classification: LCC PE1450 (ebook) | LCC PE1450 .W38 2019 (print) | DDC 428.2/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045968
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Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-285307-3
Version 06222019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285305-9
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*Robert J. Richards at the University of Chicago. As of March 28, 2018, Bob’s entry on Wikipedia contains semicolon usage that I’m quite certain would rankle him: “Richards earned two PhDs; one in the History of Science from the University of Chicago and another in Philosophy from St. Louis University.” Bob, I swear it wasn’t me!
*Back in the humanists’ day, the letters for a font were carved into steel bars. These were called “punches.” The technique was punch cutting, and its practitioner a punch cutter.
*In those days, it was usually a “him,” although there were of course exceptions.
*I’m surprised he could bring himself to use a selection. Brown was a thorough guy, the type of person who dated his copy of Churchill’s English Grammar “A.D. 1824,” lest anyone mistakenly think he might have bought it in 1824 B.C.
*My copy of Goold’s compendium is a menacing leather-bound brick measuring 9¾ inches by 6½ inches by 3 inches and tipping the scales at 4 pounds, 15 ounces. It’s caused my checked baggage to violate airline weight allowances on three occasions.
*You will notice an odd typographical quirk in Lowth’s text: the “Medial S,” which looks to the modern eye like an “f” but is to be read as an “s.” The Medial S can lead to some unintentionally seedy reading in books that are reprinted in facsimile edition, like Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, which contains a long section in which the author describes sucking air through a tube for an experiment.
*When Brown wasn’t tearing up the work of other grammarians, he made his own constructive suggestions for reform. One of my favorites of his ideas was to rename the exclamation point the “eroteme,” since it is a mark of passion. (From the Greek έρως [eros], meaning “love” or “desire.”)
*Believe it or not, this is a relatively pithy title for a nineteenth-century book; some of them really took the term title page to be an imperative to fill the whole sheet.
*Morris is probably my favorite grammarian. What can I say? I like a sharp-spoken rebel.
*Morris, as a “new grammarian” committed to observation of English, left Pope and Milton alone, unlike his predecessors. Instead of correcting the classics, the new generation of grammarians decided to amend each other’s work instead, sometimes to absurd and comical effect. Alfred Ayres, a grammarian and elocutionist who edited an 1893 edition of The English Grammar of William Cobbett, praised the book as “probably the most readable grammar ever written.” Nonetheless, Ayres demurred, Cobbett’s grammar had become a little bit dated in the fifty years that had passed since it was first printed. Ayres, as editor, felt it was his duty to repair Cobbett’s mistakes by inserting bracketed corrections throughout the book. Thus Ayres turned this example sentence from Cobbett’s original:
“And that it was this which made that false which would otherwise have been, and which was intended to be, true!”
into
“And that it was this which [that] made that false which [that] would otherwise have been, and which [that] was intended to be, true!”
So much for Cobbett’s vaunted “readability.”
*People like Robert Lowth are typically termed “prescriptivists,” and grammarians like Isaiah Morris “descriptivists.” Prescriptivists give rules about how language ought to be, while descriptivists want to observe and describe language. These categories are unfairly extreme in the case of nineteenth-century grammarians. They give the impression that supposed prescriptivists (like Lowth and his adherents) laid down laws without recognizing that a writer’s taste was still important, and they give the impression that supposed descriptivists (Morris and his ilk) just described language in action without trying to give any laws. The truth is much more complicated. All of these grammarians, negotiating the competing demands of rules and personal taste, were much more nuanced than dumping them into prescriptivist or descriptivist camps would indicate. In fact, one of the things that’s most fascinating about reading grammars from Lowth’s and Morris’s times is how plain it is on the face of the texts that the grammarians were struggling with this fundamental problem of grammar.
*One of the justices was future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, famous for his deference to legal precedent in deciding cases.
*Mayor Fitzgerald, known as “Honey Fitz” for his smooth talking and his sweet singing voice, was future U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather. JFK’s paternal line had an interest in liquor as well: Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father, made his fortune off distributing Scotch whisky. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald has a cocktail named after him—a version of the daiquiri, in a nod to his famous grandson’s favorite tipple. If you want to try one out, shake up 1½ ounces aged rum, ¾ ounces honey syrup, ¾ ounces fresh grapefruit juice, and 2 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters with ice. Better make it a double if you’re going directly on to the next chapter, where punctuation in the law takes a macabre turn.
*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 of 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 since Twain clearly couldn’t be trusted with them. (The sources that mention this piece report it variously as a letter or as a short story; I have yet to find the Twain composition that matches this description.)
*So much for trying to get off on a technicality!
*The Merra decision, it is worth noting, is cited in numerous cases post-Merra. The law relies on precedent; its past is very often our present. Equally, and perhaps much more alarmingly, this is
not the only punctuation-related death-penalty case in which an appeals court has lavished special powers and privileges on the trial judge. In People v. Huggins, a 2006 appeal case, the court examined evidence that the judge may have misinstructed the jury as to the criteria for competence to stand trial. The court transcript showed punctuation that differed from the standard instructions, but more seriously, it showed omission of a significant conjunction, an and that was critical to the meaning of the instructions. The majority opinion concludes that “it is inconceivable that the trial court misread the instruction in the nonsensical manner reflected by the punctuation supplied by the court reporter.” Lone dissenter Justice Kennard pointed out how fallacious it is to assume a judge is incapable of error in such a matter, but he did so without pointing out the broader implications of this kind of decision. We should pay attention to those broader implications: what does it mean for our jury system and for our democracy that a trial judge is deferred to over a jury, or over the available evidence? See People v. Huggins 175 38 Cal.4th 175; 41 Cal.Rptr.3d 593; 131 P.3d 995 [Apr. 2006].
*Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists as well, which didn’t help them one bit. The presiding judge referred to them as “anarchistic bastards.” See Eric Foner, “Sacco and Vanzetti,” The Nation, August 20, 1977, p. 137.
*In the 2004 film of the play, she is wearing the type of facial hair that the newspaper reporter at the beginning of Chapter Four described as a semicolon.
*“Original intent” or “meaning” is a concept beloved of legal formalists. Legal formalism is perhaps best known to Americans through the judicial opinions of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who believed that the U.S. Constitution should be applied with reference to its writers’ intentions. Punctuation is taken very seriously by advocates of formalism who “accord primacy to the text, structure, and history of the document in ascertaining the meaning of its provisions and then applying that meaning in a rigorous, logically formal way.” These formalists, despite their high tolerance for the “cumbersomeness” of their enterprise, do reach a limit beyond which they do not historicize further: they are willing to assume that rules and definitions accurately reflect usage, and that everyone involved in writing and publishing laws obeyed popular rule systems. As we’ve already seen, there’s absolutely no historical grounds for those assumptions.
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