Making a Point (21 page)

These examples illustrate the kind of writing that has led some authors to assert that the semicolon is unnecessary, and to write a book without one, as George Orwell claimed to do in
Coming Up for Air
(1939). When he returned his proofs to his publisher (Roger Senhouse, of Secker and Warburg), he added:

Did you know by the way that this book hasn't got a semicolon in it? I had decided about that time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.

In fact, as Peter Davison points out in his Penguin Classics edition, the surviving set of proofs does have three instances,
though whether this was deliberate writing or patchy proofreading remains unclear.

There's a second reason for the suspicion of semicolons which is nothing do with the frequency of their use. Its role, I said above, is to convey a semantic relationship. But what is the nature of that relationship? The primary meaning seems to be one of ‘addition': we can replace many semicolons by
and
(or
and then
). But not all. If I look carefully at the style of a moderate semicolon user (me), we see it conveying a range of other meanings, such as these examples from earlier in this book:

• an adversative meaning, where the semicolon would have to be replaced by
  but
  or
  whereas
  :
  

  In one line, they might suggest a pause; in another they might not.
  

• a restatement, where it might be replaced by
  that is
  :
  

  The whole speech is a series of exclamations; Hamlet isn't questioning anything.
  

• a result, where it might be replaced by
  as a result
  :
  

  Only a tiny elite of monks, scribes, and other professionals knew how to write; so there was no popular expectation that inscriptions should be easy to read.
  

In this last example, the resultative meaning is actually made explicit by the word
so
.

The consequence of this semantic diversity is that readers are faced with the need to make a decision. Is the semicolon expressing addition, contrast, identity, result, or any other of the meanings that English conjunctions can express?
Usually, the context makes it clear. And often the writer who is aware of the issue will reinforce the desired meaning by the use of a conjunction (as I did with
so
). But a writer who is not aware could easily slip into using a semicolon where it remains unclear what the semantic relationship between the two sentences is. To return to my opening example, what is actually going on behind this sentence?

Smith is going to speak about cars; Brown is going to speak about bikes.

If Smith and Brown are collaborators, the likely meaning is ‘addition'. And we might expand it as follows:

Smith is going to speak about cars; and Brown is going to speak about bikes.

But what if they are rivals or competing for an audience? Now the expansion goes in a different direction.

Smith is going to speak about cars; but Brown is going to speak about bikes.

Smith is going to speak about cars; so Brown is going to speak about bikes.

In short, writers should not react to a semicolon as if it were an isolated piece of punctuation. Its use or non-use should be governed by a sensitive appreciation of its role in relation to the discourse as a whole, in which semantics – not grammar – is the primary consideration. A practice of total avoidance of what can at times be a useful semantic option seems to me to be as counter-productive as the practice of overusing them.

As with other punctuation marks, the semicolon has a range of specialized separating uses, such as in mathematics,
where it can mark a boundary between expressions. In computer programming, it usually acts as a statement separator – reflecting its use in grammar. A similar use appears with some email systems, where it separates the different recipients of a message. And it surfaces as the symbol for a wink in emoticons.

In law, it's taken very seriously. In 2004, in a San Francisco court, a conservative group challenged a statute allowing gay marriage (Proposition 22, Legal Defense and Education Fund). It asked the judge to

cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.

The plea was rejected because of the punctuation. Judge James Warren explained:

The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word ‘or'. I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances.

And he added: ‘That semicolon is a big deal.'

Just how big a deal it can be was also illustrated by one of the most famous punctuation incidents of all time. It took place in France, but it was reported widely in the British local and national press. This is how
The Standard
(London) told the story in its edition of 7 February 1837:

A duel with small swords lately took place in Paris, between two well known jurisconsults of the Law School, on account of a passage of the Pandects. The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm. His adversary maintained that it should be a colon, and quoted in support of his opinion the text of
Trebonius
.

We might expect the two marks to have been equally matched, as they function at roughly the same level in the punctuation hierarchy. But the colon won, it seems.

23

Colons: the chapter

After all the fuss surrounding semicolons, colons offer us a more relaxing encounter. Many people have loved or hated semicolons; but not so many develop an emotional relationship with colons. There are some colon T-shirts, but I don't often see people wearing them. Perhaps it's because of the word's ambiguity. A slogan to ‘look after your colon' is more likely to be about cancer than punctuation.

When the colon arrived in English at the end of the sixteenth century, writers and printers had a clear idea about how to use it. As described in
Chapter 6
, they placed it within a hierarchy of pauses, expressing a silence shorter than the period but longer than the semicolon and comma. This is more or less how it's used in Shakespeare's First Folio (there's quite a lot of variation among the typesetters), such as in these examples from
Hamlet
:

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:

Whether 'tis Nobler in the minde to suffer

The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune;

Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to dye to sleepe …

We see the problem in the last line. Every modern edition would replace that colon by a period, and start a new sentence:

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep …

From a rhetorical point of view, the colon in that line had exactly the same pausing value as the one in the opening line. And as long as pronunciation ruled punctuation, it would have been interpreted in that way. It didn't matter what the constructions were on either side of it. The important thing was the length of the pause. So we see it followed by a new sentence (above), and also by parts of sentences, such as a phrase, repeated words, and even single words:

Nor I my Lord: in faith.

I humbly thanke you: well, well, well.

Fye upon't: Foh.

We can also sense an uncertainty over the use of this new mark, especially in relation to other punctuation marks:

(As I perchance heereafter shall thinke meet

To put an Anticke disposition on :)

This isn't an ancient example of an emoticon. It shows a typesetter unsure whether a closing parenthesis is sufficient to signal the required pause.

The other point to note about early use of the colon is that there was no limit to the number that might appear in a single sentence. So we find Polonius announcing the impending arrival of the Players to Hamlet in this way:

The best Actors in the world, either for Tragedie, Comedie, Historie, Pastorall: Pastoricall-Comicall-Historicall-Pastorall: Tragicall-Historicall: Tragicall-Comicall-Historicall-Pastorall: Scene indivible, or Poem unlimited.

This is very different from present-day use, as we'll see.

As soon as the grammarians took control of punctuation, the situation changed. They attempted to define rules for the
use of the colon, but the advice was vague. Here's Lindley Murray:

The Colon is used to divide a sentence into two or more parts, less connected than those which are separated by a semicolon; but not so independent as separate distinct sentences.

The problem is clear: how are we to define the degree of connection between colon and semicolon? Usage throughout the nineteenth century shows that people had no idea how to decide, as we find many examples of writing where the marks are used inconsistently and interchangeably. Here's a poetic example, which I choose because it presents the variation very clearly. It's a transcription of a manuscript of the last poem written by Edgar Allan Poe: ‘Annabel Lee' (1849). This is the beginning of the first stanza:

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;--

And this maiden she lived …

And here are the middle lines of the last:

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:--

And so, all the night-tide …

The metre and the surrounding grammatical context are the same, yet there is a punctuation shift. Now we could of course argue until daybreak about whether there is something significant in this; but any subtle interpretation would be well beyond the perception of the average reader, who is left with the impression that the choice between the colon
and semicolon is perhaps phonetic, perhaps grammatical, perhaps semantic – or simply a matter of taste. Similarly, the use of an associated dash, seen in this extract, was widespread in earlier centuries, especially in British English, but practice varied enormously. It's largely disappeared from print nowadays, though it remains popular in informal handwriting. It's even been given a name – the
colash
– part of a small family of old usages that includes the
commash
(,-) and the
semicolash
(;-).

During the nineteenth century, usage preferences began to accumulate, so much so that pundits at the beginning of the twentieth century felt able to make rules that they felt would work. Henry Fowler summed it up in typically daring metaphors:

the time when it was a second member of the hierarchy, full stop, colon, semicolon, comma, is past … [it] has acquired a special function, that of delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words; it is a substitute for such verbal harbingers as
viz
,
scil
.,
that is to say
,
i.e
., &c.

He was right about the first point. And he was almost right about the second. The primary function of the colon is indeed to ‘deliver the goods'. But this isn't its only function.

Let's explore ‘delivering the goods' a bit further. The metaphor hides various nuances.

• What comes after the colon can be an explication of what comes before. We may replace it by
  as follows
  .
  

  The issue can be briefly summarized: either we go or we don't.
  

  The second part is essential to the discourse. If the sentence were to stop at
  summarized
  we would feel
  semantically short-changed. This makes it an ideal introducer for examples (as in this book).
  

• What comes after the colon can be a rephrasing of what comes before. We may replace it by
  namely
  .
  

  Everyone accepted John's point: we had no choice but to go.
  

  Here the second part is less central to the discourse. If the sentence were to stop at ‘point', it would still make sense. What follows the colon is more a reminder or summary of what has already been said.
  

• What comes after the colon is a rhetorical contrast with what comes before. We may replace it by some such phrase as
  in contrast
  .
  

  The difficult is done at once: the impossible takes a little longer.
  

  It is an antithesis, and it displays an interesting semantic asymmetry. The first part can do without the second; but the second can't do without the first.
  

What these examples have in common is the expression of a very specific semantic relationship. This is what differentiates the colon from the period and the semicolon, which are both much more general in the meaning they convey. Consider the following three options:

(a) I looked around the room. Mike was winking. Jane was smiling.

(b) I looked around the room. Mike was winking; Jane was smiling.

(c) I looked around the room. Mike was winking: Jane was smiling.

The first is a simple narrative: one thing happened and then
another. The second asserts a semantic association between Mike and Jane, which the previous context would have made clear: as illustrated in the previous chapter, Mike and Jane are part of the same story, connected in some way. The third does something different: the colon suggests a significant link between the two events. Telling a bit more of the story will help to make these distinctions clearer:

(a) I looked around the room. Mike was winking. Jane was smiling. Graham was grinning widely. Everyone could see what had happened …

(b) I looked around the room. Mike was winking; Jane was smiling. Graham, their next-door neighbour, was ignoring them, as he always did at parties. …

(c) I looked around the room. Mike was winking: Jane was smiling. It was great to see that my plan to bring them together had worked.

Jane was smiling
because
Mike was winking. It's a subtle point, but it's the sort of thing that sophisticated writers do.

The positions of the colon and the semicolon in the punctuation hierarchy have thus shifted over the centuries. In a pronunciation-dominated era, the colon outranked the semicolon. Now both marks function at the same level: one level down from the sentence-ending period, and one level up from the phrase-dividing comma. Some analysts rank the semicolon as somewhat higher, because it has a much wider set of functions:

• The semicolon has a broader semantic reach. The range of meanings conveyed by the semicolon, as we saw in the previous chapter, is wide and indeterminate. By contrast, the range of meanings expressed by the colon is limited and much easier to define.
  
• The grammatical function of the semicolon is to join
  sentences (or elements of sentences) in a balanced way. By contrast, balance is not an issue when using the colon. What follows the colon is often not a sentence at all, but a phrase, an individual word, or a list of items:
  

  John got what he wanted for his birthday: a new pen.
  

  There was only one thing left to do: cry.
  

  Continue the sequence: 5, 10, 15, 20 …
  

• We often encounter more than one semicolon in a single sentence; but it's rare to see more than one colon. Style guides advise writers not to use a sequence of colons in a single sentence. They usually just say it is ‘bad style'; but the underlying reason is semantic. Explications within explications get confusing:
  

  Everyone accepted John's point: there were three options available to those who wanted to attend the conference: to drive, take the train, or catch one of the frequent buses: either the 3.30 from Oxford or the 4.10 from Reading.
  

  We keep having to change perspectives as we read this sentence. The first explication (
  there were three …
  ) makes us refer back to
  John's point
  . The second (
  to drive …
  ) makes us refer back to
  three options
  . The third (
  either …
  ) makes us refer back to
  frequent buses
  . We are trying to read in a forwards direction, but the colons keep forcing us to make retrospective semantic connections. This isn't a problem if we have to do it just once in a sentence; but it becomes a strain when we have to do it repeatedly.
  

Perhaps because the colon has so few meanings, it has
developed a wide range of specialized uses marking separation – far more than the period and semicolon. It has an advantage over the period in being more visible, so we tend to see it more often when we need to separate numerals, as in times (3:40 pm), dates (1:3:14), and racing results in hours, minutes, and seconds (2:14:56), especially online and on electronic clock faces. The period could also perform this role, but as this mark is already used for specific mathematical functions (such as a decimal) there's a reluctance to extend it. We thus see a race result involving tenths of a second written with both symbols: 9:3.4 (9 minutes 3.4 seconds).

Other specialized uses are found in computer programs and mathematical settings. For example, it identifies a ratio in mathematics (3:4), and this has many applications, such as in map scales (1:5000). We see it on our computer screens as part of a drive letter (such as C:) or as a component delimiter in web addresses (http:// …). In print, it's widely used to separate main titles from subtitles, though typography often replaces this function on book jackets and in chapter headings, as we saw on p. 113. It's also standard practice to use a colon before speeches in play scripts (as on p. 140) or verbatim reports (as in the Hansard example on p. 133), and it's a regular way of introducing a quotation (as throughout this book). It can show a repeat in musical scores, a long vowel or consonant in phonetics, or a pair of eyes in an emoticon :). Idiosyncratic usage includes a double colon in some Internet game exchanges to show a parenthetical action or quotation within a narrative:

::curses and leaves the room::

At the same time, there's a great deal of house-style variation. Some publishers use it to separate place and publisher in bibliographies:

Crystal, D. 2012.
The Story of English in 100 Words
. London: Profile Books.

Some use it in indexes, separating a heading from its subheadings:

politics: in France 4, 11; in Germany 17, 44

Some use it to separate the numerals in section headings (3:12). Others use the period, or even the comma, for some of these functions. In bibliographies, for example, we will see such variants as:

London. Profile Books.

London, Profile Books.

From a grammatical point of view, the earlier examples in this chapter have one thing in common: the element preceding the colon would, in other circumstances, be a sentence. It is, technically, an independent clause.

Everyone accepted John's point: we had no choice but to go.

Everyone accepted John's point.

The only exceptions are when what follows a transitive verb (i.e. one where an object is required) is a quotation or direct speech. We will find people writing the following examples with the verb followed by a comma or no punctuation, but often a colon is used:

The subtitle read: ‘The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation'.

John asked: ‘Where are we going?'