If, out of all the punctuation marks you have at your disposal, the semicolon alone gives you nervous twitches (What IS it?! It’s not a period… it’s not a comma… what am I supposed to DO with this?!?), you’ll be glad to know you’re not alone:
“Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly, I pinch them out of my prose,” says the American postmodern writer Donald Barthelme in his essay Not-Knowing.
Others feel quite differently:
If I were linguistic emperor,” says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, “not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I’m on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”
This, and more, from an appallingly fascinating article in London’s Financial Times this week. Who knew semicolons could be so, well, complex? 😉