The Argument on Semicolons: More Heated than a Team Edward-Team Jacob Forum

A squiggle and a dot: the greatest points of contention in history (among some circles).  The semicolon has been much used and abused in its four hundred-odd years.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century writers did nothing without it; in the nineteenth century a rebellious few voiced their abhorrence, and for most of the twentieth century it was in to deem semicolons as decidedly out. 

 

No other punctuation mark has been so loved or hated, almost to death even (among some circles). And like most things feared or revered, it's been widely misunderstood. It's been called bourgeois, lazy, pompous, old-fashioned, addictive, and too subtle for the brain of man to grasp. It still makes headlines in France.

Writers have been weighing in for nearly two hundred years, and the vote is pretty much split. Who are the friends and enemies of this controversial little mark? Which camp do you belong to and why?

Friends

Virginia Woolf

Ben Jonson

Truman Capote

Ben MacIntyre

Marcel Proust

"You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."  - George Bernard Shaw

"I like them — they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better." - Will Self

"But with the semicolon there you get a pleasant sense of expectancy…" - Lewis Thomas

"But how much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all." - Lynne Truss

Enemies (aka Pompous Sillies)

Ernest Hemingway

Stephen King

George Orwell

Edgar Allen Poe

Somerset Maugham

“The semicolon has become so hateful to me that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.”  - Paul Robinson

“Ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” - Donald Barthelme

“How hideous is the semicolon.” – Samuel Beckett

"But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." - Kurt Vonnegut

Inspired by the Book: The Bun Also Rises

It began with The Bun Also Rises. My friend and I, both English majors with a penchant for word games, began, completely spontaneously, texting each other book title-food item puns. Neither of us can remember why it started, nor did we ever discuss the rules to our game.  Eventually, we had a list of over a hundred book-food combos.  Among the best of them: Candide Yams, Love in the Time of Cauliflower, and 100 Years of Solid Foods.

As I said, The Bun Also Rises was only the beginning.  Our game's gone through many iterations now, with no theme being too stupid for our consideration (case in point, the short-lived cat-themed round, from whence came Catlass Shrugged). We made our own the game the late Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie played, in which you take a classic book title and make it lame: Celsius 232.78, A Tale of Two Unincorporated Census-Designated Places, The Pretty Good Gatsby... It's harder than you'd think.

Our current version is the most challenging yet: book titles crossed with TV shows. The short list, so far:

1. Clarissa Explains it All (works for Clarissa OR Mrs. Dalloway! Double points!)
2. Death of Two and a Half Salesmen
3. On the Road Rules (followed by Around the Real World in 80 Days)
4. Full House of Mirth
5. Are You There God? It's Me, Matlock
6. Saved by the Bell Jar
7. Tuesdays with Maury
8. The West Wings of the Dove

I won't say which of us came up with what. But I am opening the game up to all you internet-folk out there. Leave your best puns and suggest new, equally ridiculous themes for the next round. 

Authors Atwitter

A couple months ago, I wrote about Salman Rushdie's foray into Twitter, a beautiful little experiment on language and the literary community. This week the New York Times published an article by Anne Trubek on the same topic, which makes me feel a) awesome about being ahead of the Times, and b) underachieving because their article is so good.

Anne Trubek and the authors she interviews (Eugenides, Rushdie, and Atwood, to name a few) elaborate on a few of the points I hit in my old blog post: for one, the chance authors have to be accessible to their audience, both for publicity and on principle (that is, debunking the myth of the enigmatic Tortured Artist). For another, that social media is the great equalizer; when The Author engages with The Rest of Us, the boundaries around the literary elite are lowered, and a richer literary community is born of it.

Just thinking of tweets.

Other authors are drawn to Twitter by what the poet D.A. Powell calls its "prosodic tools." The character limit is an open challenge to write the most pithy, perfect one-liners -- no easy feat, as anyone who's been flummoxed by the character countdown knows. Twitter is the perfect arena for the aphoristically inclined; the very brevity of the tweet can bestow the "eclat of a proverb" on even the mundane.

In tweet-form: Twitter is to today's authors what dinner parties were to Oscar Wilde. Minus the meal.

New Year's Resolution #1

I will avoid nominalizations.

Latin may be dead, but it continues to warp our living language. I'm not talking about the 60 percent or so of English words evolved from Latin: words like vulgar, brevity, bonus or civil. I'm talking about the words to which we've tacked on endless strings of prefixes and suffixes to serve our convenience: the bloated, bastardized nominalizations.

...inalization.

All language starts with the physical world, with a word denoting a tangible thing -- a person, a place, a physical quality, an action. The word "margin," for example, made a quick leap from the Old English word "margos," meaning an edge or border. And then the latinization began (dun dun DUN!).

Margin -> Marginal -> Marginalize -> Marginalization

With Latin suffixes at work, we've gone full circle from a noun to a new noun: but with each new Latin suffix, we get a word a little bit uglier, a little more abstract, a little more Vulgar (puns!).

I don't want to institute a universal ban on nominalizations: they can be used safely, if sparingly, and more importantly, judiciously.  When using a nominalization, consider two things:

1. Diction: Is there a simpler, non-nominalization I could be using? What am I even trying to say?
2. Syntax: What is this word doing to the rest of my sentence?  Am I slipping into passive voice or vagueness?  Is this word obstructing my cadence and flow?

And that rounds out our Top 10 New Year's Resolutions.  It's been fun, it's been therapeutic, it's been real. And seriously, guys, we'd love to hear from you. Did your writerly pet peeve not make our list? Let us know. We'll write a post about it just for you. You'll be Internet-famous in 2012. 

New Year's Resolution #2

I will consult the dictionary and thesaurus.

We're fortunate to have one of the richest, largest languages in existence - according to Oxford Dictionaries, we've got at least a quarter of a million words to work with. The ideal word is always out there, if you're willing to look for it; and with online dictionaries, the right-click thesaurus in Word, and the lovely dictionary/thesaurus on Macbook, finding it isn't exactly the quest it used to be.

There's no excuse for using the same adjective three times in a paragraph -- but there is a more awful crime: Even worse than limited diction is inappropriate diction.  At best, you use vocabulary that is obviously overreaching: a classic Someone Hit the Thesaurus Button scenario. At worst, you completely misuse a word and end up looking like George H.W.  (Actually, even worse than that is when you misspell a word and end up looking like his VP.)

So here is my 3 Step Guide to Better Diction in 2012:

1. Use the thesaurus constantly.
2. Only use it to jog your memory: pick words you actually know and occasionally use.
3. Even if you think you know a word, check its spelling and definition anyway.

Best Friend!

If you were to add to that list, I'd recommend the adage of the singularly pithy Winston Churchill: "Broadly speaking, the short words are best and the old words best of all." If you doubt it, read this blog post about a study on word choice and perceived intelligence. Evidently, it is the smarties that keep it simple. 

Opening Up a Can of Clichés

At the risk of stealing on of Kate the Younger’s New Year’s resolutions, I want to sneak in here and with a curmudgeonly end of year complaint about clichés.

On fellow speechwriter David Meadvin’s blog, he recently complained about politicians who overuse the phrase “America’s best days are ahead,” a soul-sucked version of President’ Hoover’s “prosperity is just around the corner.” 

I have to admit to some sympathy to the writers who keep dragging this war horse out and plopping it into stump speeches, especially ones for incumbents.  The phrase is a neat way to brush right by the point each of these speakers needs to make, if only to avoid a Bush Sr. at the grocery scanner moment of cluelessness : “Yes, the economy stinks, you lost your job, and your Kmart closed before a rich benefactor came along to help you get that automatic foot massager out of layaway, but there is a plan: It is going to get better, just elect or re-elect me.”

So when does a tired phrase or an oft-wielded political dodge turn into cliché?  I think when it has, through numbing repetition, lost so much meaning that one starts to hear it used, not just mindlessly, but senselessly.

Take my nominee for cliché of the year, 2011: “kick the can down the road,” deployed endlessly by commentators and politicians alike during the 600 or 700 crises this year during which Congress found yet another way to dodge its fiscal responsibilities.

I knew the phrase had crossed the mighty divide into cliché-dom when an earnest representative of the nation’s youth (note to youth, by the way, when you hold your secret meetings to elect your representatives, work on getting someone who sounds a little less like a self-impressed prig) said on NPR: “Congress has kicked the can down the road again, and the nation’s youth are the can.”

No -- you are not.  While I have no objections to kicking the nation’s youth down the road -- if only to get through the election season without having to listen to another self-satisfied late teen talk seriously about not wasting his first vote in a presidential election -- the nation’s youth are not the can.  They may one day be on the receiving end of a flying can, one stuffed with degraded Treasury bonds and worthless Fannie Mae stock, but they are not the can.

What’s your nominee for cliché of the year?  Let us know here or on Facebook.  And don’t wait too long lest you become distracted by America’s best days, which are, you know, right around the corner, next to that old kicked in can, filled with the nation’s youth.

Kate S.

December 31, 2011  

New Year's Resolution #3

I will not arbitrarily capitalize.

CAPS CAPS CAPS!

There’s been a rash of arbitrary capitalization in recent years.  Maybe it’s because there are so many official designations floating around, and people have taken to assuming things should be capitalized that should not. Or they want to err on the side of caution. Or they feel capitalization bestows importance or emphasis.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself. The following, no matter how many times you see them capitalized in print, are lower cased in the body of your text.*

federal

civilian

defense

government

department

Those are just a few of the most common cases of incorrect case - they're everywhere. In my mind, there are four situations in which it is acceptable to use nonstandard capitalization:

1. You are J.D. Salinger and are going for a touch of irony.

2. You are Paul Krugman and are going for a touch of irony.

3. You are an 18^th century essayist writing about things like Beauty and Intellect.

4. You are writing nouns in German (in which case, it would be standard capitalization, because, you know, it’s German).

For the full rules for capitalization, consult a style guide. The University of South Carolina has a pretty straightforward one here, and it’s always a good idea to invest in a copy of the AP Style Guide.

*Unless they're part of an official title: the Department of Defense, the State of Alaska, the Government Accountability Office, or the UC Berkeley Department of English, for example.