Semi Life
At Slate, Paul Collins asks if modern life has killed the semicolon:
The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that “All [semicolons] do is show that you’ve been to college.” New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was “semicolon boy.” And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that “the killer could be a freelance journalist” because of his “use of a semicolon” in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that “Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.”)
Too sloppy, too romantic, the fatuous accoutrement of undergraduates and serial killers — ouch. But if these modern indictments of the semicolon militate against its use today, some others militate strongly in its favor:
Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate‘s founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that “[t]he most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is.” All journalists can cop to this: The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.
What better defines the contemporary scene than relationships in which no one has to — or wants to — make clear what those relationships are? The vertigo of private and public disorder that surrounds us leaves us all woozy little clauses, drunk and disoriented, faithless about any mooring but maybe our own fugitive moments of temporary solidarity. The semicolon really is the top half of our cultural emoticon: one eye staring blankly ahead (in boredom or in terror?), one eye slipped closed (is that sadness? or just cutting irony? or is it mid-laugh? or simply the lid of an escapist who can’t look?). If anything captures the semi-ness of life today, it’s the semicolon; caught somewhere between intimacy and distance, coherence and randomness, strength and weakness, it promises judgment, but only waits.