One of the pleasures of a recent piece on semicolons by Ben Dolnick, in the Times (“Semicolons: A Love Story”), was his reference to William James, whose deft use of the semicolon to pile on clauses, Dolnick writes, is “a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another?” I like this because it reminds me that I have always meant to read “The Varieties of Religious Experience”; also because it makes the point that we learn how to punctuate by reading. Finally, the image of the grocery bags reinforces the idea that semicolons are all about balance.

In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.

In my observation, British writers reach for the semicolon much more often than American writers do. It must have something to do with the educational system: the British are given different things to read in school. A brief, unscientific study of the two New Yorker film critics, Anthony Lane (U.K.) and David Denby (U.S.A.), reveals that Lane uses the semicolon almost twice as often as Denby. (I am not counting the use of the semicolon as an extra-strength comma to separate items in a series that already has commas in it.) In three random columns by each critic, Lane uses six semicolons in two columns and four in one; Denby weighs in at four, three, and two. I’m guessing that Lane imbibed the classics; Denby drank Philip Roth.

(That was a spontaneous use of the semicolon, demonstrating the strenuous thought that went into the sentence.)

I have a friend who worked as a copy editor in Canada, and whose education was therefore more British than American. She is very fond of the semicolon, and has pioneered her own use of it, replacing the comma in the greeting of a letter, thus:

Dear MaJa;

She likes to think of a semicolon as a comma with vibrato. (She plays the viola.) I have never liked vibrato. I like a clear sound, without a lot of throb in it. As a kid, I thought it was tragic that the great violinists all had such debilitating tremors.

As if on cue, to curb my wayward thoughts, last week I received in the mail a copy of a little book put out by an English firm called User design and titled “Punctuation..?” It’s thirty-five pages long, with illustrated examples of twenty-one punctuation marks, including guillemets (French quotation marks; not to be confused with guillemots, which are auks), arranged in alphabetical order. It is especially good on the difference between the colon and the semicolon. The semicolon is listed last in the Table of Contents, but it makes an eloquent appearance earlier, in the entry for the colon: “A semicolon links two balanced statements; a colon explains or unpacks the statement or information before it.”

I think the semicolon is more easily understood if it is defined in relation to the colon rather than to the comma. Under “Semicolon,” the book says, “Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.”

So the semicolon is exactly what it looks like: a subtle hybrid of colon and comma. Actually, in Greek, the same symbol has been used since ancient times to indicate a question.

And it still seems to have a vestigial interrogative quality to it, a cue to the reader that the writer is not finished yet; she is holding her breath. For example, if the sentence above—“She looked at me; I was lost for words”—occurred as dialogue in a piece that I was copy-editing, I would be tempted to poke in a period and make it into two sentences. In general, people—even people in love—do not speak in flights that demand semicolons. But in this instance I have to admit that without the semicolon something would be lost. With a period, the four words sink at the end: SHE LOOKED at me. The semicolon keeps the words above water: because of that semicolon, something about her look is going to be significant.

The title “Punctuation..?” employs a hybrid of an ellipsis and a question mark, with the point of the question mark doing double duty as the third dot in an ellipsis. To me it looks off balance—a triumph of design over tradition—partly because there is no space between the word and the ellipsis. If I had invented the interrogative ellipsis, I think I’d have gone with “Punctuation???” Or maybe “Punctuation;” it would have the effect of suggesting that you supply your own subtitle.

Read Mary Norris on commas, pencils, diaeresis, swears, the history of The New Yorker, and more.

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