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By Root 171 0

course, nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.” Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”. Fay Weldon says she positively dislikes semicolons, “which is odd, because I don’t dislike anybody really”. Meanwhile, that energetic enemy to all punctuation Gertrude Stein (remember she said the comma was “servile”?) said that semicolons suppose themselves superior to the comma, but are mistaken:

They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.

Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 1935

But how much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all. I say they are just show-offs. And I say it’s wonderful that when Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983) he cheerfully explained (so the apocryphal story goes) that the machine he typed The Name of the Rose on simply didn’t have a semicolon, so it was slightly unwise of this earnest chap to make too much of it.

Non-writers are wary of both the colon and the semicolon, though, partly because all this rarefied debate rages above their heads. Eric Partridge, in his 1953 book You Have a Point There, says that using colons in your writing is the equivalent of playing the piano with crossed hands. But sadly, anyone lazily looking for an excuse not to master the colon and semicolon can always locate a respectable reason, because so many are advanced. Here are some of the most common:

1 They are old-fashioned

2 They are middle-class

3 They are optional

4 They are mysteriously connected to pausing

5 They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)

6 The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man

I hope we shall happily demolish all these objections in the following pages. But it is worth remarking that Fleet Street style gurus fly the flag for most of the prejudices listed above – especially as applied to the semicolon, a mark they increasingly strike out with puritanical gusto. The semicolon has currently fallen out of fashion with newspapers, the official reason being that readers of newsprint prefer their sentences short, their paragraphs bite-sized and their columns of type uncluttered by wormy squiggles. It’s more likely that the real reasons are a pathetic editorial confusion about usage and a policy of distrusting contributors even when they demonstrably know their onions. But heigh-ho. There is no point trying to turn the clock back. The great theatre critic James Agate, in his diary for 1935, recorded how a notoriously fastidious fellow journalist “once telephoned a semicolon from Moscow”. Well. You could imagine the reception he would get today.

Are the colon and semicolon old-fashioned? No, but they are old. The first printed semicolon was the work of good old Aldus Manutius just two years after Columbus sailed to the New World, and at the same date and place as the invention of double-entry book-keeping. But although I still swoon every time I look at this particular semicolon from 1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma. The medieval scribes had used a symbol very similar to our modern semicolon in their Latin transcripts to