James Chutter

In a world gone mad one man is trying to bring the semicolon, a reminder to slow down and take stock, back into the public eye.  It’s nice to see some discussion around getting back to basics when it comes to punctuation.  Keeping up with the new wave of dodgy grammar wielded by text messaging and rapid fire Facebook messaging can be a Herculean task. Let us all pause and contemplate life and our friend the semicolon.

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Source: nytimes.com via James Chutter

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