Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [33]
So how should you use the colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon “delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words”, which is not a bad image to start with. But the holy text of the colon and semicolon is the letter written by George Bernard Shaw to T. E. Lawrence in 1924, ticking him off for his over-use of colons in the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This superb missive starts with the peremptory, “My dear Luruns [sic], Confound you and your book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo” – and then gets even more offensive and hilarious as it goes on. Shaw explains that, having worked out his own system for colons and semicolons, he has checked it against the Bible, and seen that the Bible almost got it right. With such authority behind him, he is offended by Lawrence’s cavalier attitude. “I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces,” he explains. “As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rules for you.”
Shaw is quite famous for his idiosyncratic punctuation. His semicolons, in particular, were his way of making his texts firmly actor-proof – in fact, when Ralph Richardson tried to insert a few dramatic puffs and pants in his opening lines as Bluntschli in a 1931 production of Arms and the Man (1894), Shaw stopped him at once and told him to forget the naturalism and observe the punctuation instead. “This is all very well, Richardson,” Shaw said (according to Richardson’s account), “and it might do for Chekhov, but it doesn’t do for me. Your gasps are upsetting my stops and my semicolons, and you’ve got to stick to them.” Richardson said Shaw spoke the truth about this: miss any of Shaw’s stops and “the tune won’t come off”. Look at any Shaw text and you will find both colons and semicolons in over-abundance, with deliberate spacing to draw attention to them, too, as if they are genuine musical notation.
Captain Bluntschli. I am very glad to see you ; but you must leave this house at once. My husband has just returned with my future son-in-law ; and they know nothing. If they did, the consequences would be terrible. You are a foreigner : you do not feel our national animosities as we do.
Arms and the Man, Act II
To adopt George Bernard Shaw’s use of the semicolon today would obviously be an act of insanity. But in the letter to T. E. Lawrence he is sound on the colon. When two statements are “placed baldly in dramatic apposition”, he said, use a colon. Thus, “Luruns could not speak: he was drunk.” Shaw explains to Lawrence that when the second statement reaffirms, explains or illustrates the first, you use a colon; also when you desire an abrupt “pull-up’: ‘Luruns was congenitally literary: that is, a liar.’
You will see [writes Shaw] that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician’s assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.
In each of the following examples, incidentally,