An Irishman's Diary

ITS prominence on AZERTY keyboards (An Irishman’s Diary, May 23rd) might imply that, among the French at least, the semicolon is still fashionable.

But au contraire. Despite being harder to find, the full stop thrives among AZERTY users too. And while it may still be more popular there than elsewhere, the semicolon’s glory days are past, even in France.I

f there was a single, historic high-point, it must have been a duel fought in 1837 between two French law professors. Details are sketchy now, but their dispute reportedly originated in a disagreement about whether a sentence in a legal document should have a colon or a semicolon. The encounter was non-fatal, happily, although the defender of the semicolon apparently came off worse, wounded in the arm.

This seems sadly typical. Fairly or otherwise, the semicolon has acquired a reputation for being one of the more effete punctuation marks, and its champions are tainted by association. Had he been fighting against a full-stop enthusiast, you would somehow expect the semicolon man to lose, fatally, perhaps sighing his last words in a complex sentence, with sub-clauses. But even in a colon-only battle, it appears, the semi’s representative couldn’t win.

And yet, despite that setback, semicolons were still in their heyday circa 1837, on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed they had recently seen off major competition from the dash, for which there had been a craze – peaking about 20 years earlier – among romantic poets.

Even the word “dash” has a dramatic quality. And these rapier-like thrusts were so popular with Byron and his generation that they became a cliche. This in turn brought a backlash, so that the share-price of the semicolon rose again. As late as 1848, the renewed ubiquity of semicolons was such that Edgar Allen Poe complained about their unwanted imposition by editors.

But another, bigger threat to the semicolon was looming. This was new media, 1850-style, or the telegraph, as it was better known. It was in the rat-tat-tat of morse code that the punchiness of Hemingway and modern journalese may both have roots.

And the impatience with grammar wasn’t just a new fashion.

Telegrams were fiercely expensive, with punctuation costing just as much as other characters. So devotion to semicolons could now cost you. But in any cases, fashions did change too. By the 20th century, writers like Proust, whose confetti-like use of the semicolon we discussed last week, were the exception, even in France.

Shorter sentences, separated by machine-gun full stops, were the new norm. In 1943 the London Times was moved to lament the “war” being waged against the semicolon, and blamed “action fiction” in particular. As an editorial said: “The semicolon is the enemy of action; it is the agent of reflection and meditation.” In a macho age, this was the nub of the problem. There were other defenders, including George Bernard Shaw. In a letter to TE Lawrence (of Arabia), Shaw gave out to him for the almost complete abstinence from semicolons in his writing. “This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life,” he lectured.

But it was a losing cause. By mid-century, semicolons were held in general contempt. Kurt Vonnegut warned against using them, in sexual terms: “They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” In a broadly similar vein, when the three-time mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia wanted to insult an opponent for being excessively bureaucratic, he called him “semicolon boy”.

The decline of the punctuation mark in the US was temporarily arrested, in bizarre circumstances, during the 1970s. Unfortunately the person responsible was a serial killer, David Berkowitz. He became more infamous as “Son of Sam”. But in the course of his rampages, he left an infamous note for police that was unusual for, among other things, correctly using a semicolon.

Usefully or not, this influenced the list of possible suspects. And it caused New York Post columnist Jimmy Breslin (the recipient of another Son of Sam note) to conclude, years later, that Berkowitz was the only murderer he had ever known of who could use the semicolon properly. So if the punctuation mark is, as the Times suggested, “an agent of reflection and meditation”, Berkowitz was the exception who proved the rule.

The 1837 duellists proved it too, more positively. Rash as they may have been in having the row, they at least avoided fatalities. But then again, this may have been as much a comment on the nature of 19th century French duelling, as on the civilising effects of grammar. Certainly Mark Twain thought so.

When his visit to France in 1878 coincided with another non-fatal duel, this time between two politicians, he wrote a long and very funny account of the incident. In the introduction, he disagreed with the American perception that the typical French duel was harmless. On the contrary, he wrote: “Since it is always fought in the open air, the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold”.

And helpfully including an example of the semicolon in action, Twain went on: “M Paul de Cassagnac, the most inveterate of the French duellists, has suffered so often in this way that he is at last a confirmed invalid; and the best physician in Paris has expressed the opinion that if he goes on duelling for 15 or 20 years more – unless he forms the habit of fighting in a comfortable room where damps and draughts cannot intrude – he will eventually endanger his life.”