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Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life
Cecelia Watson
‘Fascinating… I loved this book; I really did’ David Crystal, Spectator A biography of a much misunderstood punctuation mark and a call to arms in favour of clear expression and against stifling grammar rules. Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realized that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored. One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In this warm, funny, enlightening and thoroughly original book, Cecelia Watson takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the surprising history of the semicolon and explores the remarkable power it can wield, if only we would stop being afraid of it. Forget the rules; you’re in charge. It’s time to make language do what you want it to.
(#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
Copyright (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
Dedication (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
For my parents,
who made sure I always had enough to read
Epigraph (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
Punctuation is a gentle and unobtrusive art that has long been one of the misfortunes of man. For about three hundred years it has been harassing him, and bewildering him with its quiet contrariness, and no amount of usage seems to make him grow in familiarity with the art.
‘Power of Points: Punctuation That Upset Work of Solons’, Boston Daily Globe, 20 January 1901
Contents
1 Cover (#ucf172f39-24f2-516a-bedd-cb174fc48006)
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Epigraph
6 Contents
7 Introduction: Love, Hate and Semicolons
8 I: Deep History
9 II: The Science of Semicolons
10 III: Sexy Semicolons
11 IV: Loose Women and Liquor Laws
12 V: The Minutiae of Mercy
13 VI: Carving Semicolons in Stone
14 VII: Semicolon Savants
15 VIII: Persuasion and Pretension
16 Conclusion: Against the Rules? (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Acknowledgements
18 Notes
19 Index
20 About the Author
21 About the Publisher
LandmarksCover (#ucf172f39-24f2-516a-bedd-cb174fc48006)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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Introduction
Love, Hate and Semicolons (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
‘The semicolon has become so hateful to me,’ confessed Paul Robinson in a New Republic essay, ‘that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.’ When Robinson, a humanities professor at Stanford, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he’s filled with ‘exasperation’. Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted foe, but he’s hardly its only modern detractor. Novelists from George Orwell to Donald Barthelme have held forth on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both. Kurt Vonnegut advised omitting them entirely, accusing them of ‘representing absolutely nothing. All they do,’ he admonished writers, ‘is show you’ve been to college.’ And almost 800,000 people have shared a web comic that labels the semicolon ‘the most feared punctuation mark on earth’. Yet when the Italian humanists invented the semicolon in the fifteenth century, they conceived of it as an aid to clarity, not (as Professor Robinson now characterises it) a ‘pretentious’ mark used chiefly to ‘gloss over an imprecise thought’. In the late 1800s, the semicolon was downright trendy, its frequency of use far outstripping that of one of its relatives, the colon. How did the semicolon, once regarded with admiration, come to seem so offensive, so unwieldy, to so many people?
Asking this question might seem academic in all the worst ways: what practical value could there be in mulling over punctuation, and in particular its history, when we have efficiently slim guidebooks like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and thick reference volumes like The Oxford Manual of Style to set straight our misplaced colons and commas? We have rules for this sort of thing! But rule-based punctuation guides are a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 1800s, the majority of grammarians and scholars advocated personal taste and judgment as a guide to punctuating, or ‘pointing’, a text. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher George Campbell, writing the same year the United States Declaration of Independence was signed, argued that ‘language is purely a species of fashion … It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech.’
Yet what Campbell and most of his contemporaries thought was a ‘preposterous’ idea soon became a commonplace principle: as the 1700s drew to a close, new grammar books began to espouse systems of rules that were purportedly derived from logic. In these new books, grammarians didn’t hesitate to impugn the grammar of writers traditionally considered superb stylists: Milton and Shakespeare were chastised for ‘gross mistakes’, and subjected to grammarians’ emendations, so that these great authors’ works were made to fall in line with rules established centuries after their deaths.
But a strange thing happened as the new genre of grammar rule books developed: instead of making people less confused about grammar, rule books seemed to cause more problems. No one knew which system of rules was the most correct one, and the more specific the grammarians made their guidelines for using punctuation marks like the semicolon, the more confusing those punctuation marks became. The more defined the function of the semicolon became, the more anxiety people experienced about when to use a semicolon in writing and how to interpret one while reading. Grammarians fought viciously over the supremacy of their individual sets of rules, scorching one another in the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars. Courts of law, too, were in a lather over how to deal with punctuation marks: a semicolon in an 1875 legal statute caused all of Boston to fly into a panic when courts opined that it meant that alcohol couldn’t be served past 11 p.m. (Bostonians, ever resourceful, devised some pretty clever ways to get drunk well into the wee hours until the statute was finally revised six years after it went into force.)
The story of the semicolon told in these pages follows a chronological path, charting its transformation from a mark designed to create clarity to a mark destined to create confusion. The events described here epitomise the major steps in the life of the semicolon: they show how it was transformed over time, and what was important about those transformations. That importance lies in the semicolon’s ability to symbolise and trigger ideas and emotions that transcend the punctuation mark itself. The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink.
The semicolon’s biography is also a story about grammar and language more generally – and this history will challenge the myth most of us like to tell ourselves about grammar. Grammar (in our mythical narrative) is part of the good old days: people used to know grammar properly, we think, the same way they used to walk three miles to school uphill in the snow, and everyone was polite and better looking and thin and well dressed. There are reasons why these romantic visions of the past flourish in our collective consciousness: the stories of our grandparents; old black-and-white portraits that freeze the past in Sunday best; and most powerfully of all, a vague shared sense that the world is growing less innocent and less coherent, and that the past must therefore be better the further back uphill into it we are able to climb. Things were harder in some ways back then, we acknowledge; but weren’t they also better and purer, too?
‘It’s tough being a stickler for puntuation these days,’ sighs Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as if before ‘these days’ there was a time when everyone was committed to proper grammar and everyone agreed on what proper grammar constituted. Self-styled grammar ‘sticklers’, ‘snobs’, ‘nazis’, and ‘bitches’ want so much to get back to that point in the past where the majority of people respected language and understood its nuances, and society at large shared a common understanding of grammar rules. But that past utopia is a mirage. There was no time when everyone spoke flawless English and people punctuated ‘properly’. It’s important to come to grips with this historical fact, because it influences how we act in the present: after we nail down some basic punctuation history here through the story of the semicolon, I’ll show that hanging on to the old story about grammar – the mythical story – limits our relationship with language. It keeps us from seeing, describing, and creating beauty in language that rules can’t comprehend.
I wouldn’t deny that there’s joy in knowing a set of grammar rules; there is always joy in mastery of some branch of knowledge. But there is much more joy in becoming a reader who can understand and explain how it is that a punctuation mark can create meaning in language that goes beyond just delineating the logical structure of a sentence. Great punctuation can create music, paint a picture, or conjure emotions. This book will show you how the semicolon is essential to the effectiveness and aesthetic appeal of passages from Herman Melville, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Irvine Welsh, Rebecca Solnit, and other masters of English fiction and non-fiction. Looking at these authors, we will see beautiful uses of the semicolon that cannot be adequately encapsulated in grammarians’ rules, nor explained simply as a ‘breaking’ of those rules.
Still, inadequate and artificial as grammar rules are, I understand what it’s like to love them. In fact, I’m a reformed grammar fetishist myself, the sort of person who used to feel that her love for English was best expressed by means of irritation at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe, or outright heart palpitations over a comma splice. My own dive into the history of the semicolon was precipitated by a fight over one that my PhD adviser, Bob,* had circled in one of my papers, alleging that it violated the precepts of The Chicago Manual of Style (at the time, Bob was chair of the board of the press that publishes the Manual). I insisted that the semicolon in question was a perfectly legitimate interpretation of one of the umpteen semicolon rules the Manual laid out, and round and round Bob and I went for weeks, grandstanding about the meaning of the Manual’s rules. Finally, during one of these heated debates, it occurred to me to wonder: Where do they come from, these rules I cherish so much, and believe I know so well?
Answering that question took me on a ten-year journey through piles of dusty grammar books that had lain untouched on library shelves for decades, and more often centuries. Some, having been forgotten for so long, collapsed in my hands; others left my palms tinted a guilty red with rot from their decaying leather bindings. But the words inside those old grammar books had lost none of their liveliness and passion, and I soon became absorbed in the drama of grammarians’ attempts to create a market for their rules in the face of an initially sceptical public. The story that I began to piece together from their pages called on all my skills as an academic. It demanded my expertise in the history of science: grammar rules, it turns out, began as an attempt to ‘scientise’ language, because science was what parents wanted their children to be taught in public [state] schools. Equally, the story of the semicolon called on my training in philosophy, as I began to wonder what ethical imperatives knowing the true history of grammar rules might impose. And finally, crucial to making sense of the story of the semicolon were my years of experience teaching writing at institutions like Yale, the University of Chicago, and Bard College.
By the time I had finished writing the story contained in these pages, I had changed everything about how I looked at grammar. I still love language, but I love it in a richer way. Not only did I become a better and more sensitive reader and a more capable teacher, I also became a better person. Perhaps that sounds like a fancifully hyperbolic claim – can changing our relationship with grammar really make us better human beings? By the end of this book, I hope to persuade you that reconsidering grammar rules will do exactly that, by refocusing us on the deepest, most primary value and purpose of language: true communication and openness to others.
But before I can try to persuade you of this, we have to look the past square in the face. Ever since grammar rules were invented, they have caused at least as much confusion and distress as they have ameliorated; and people living one hundred years ago had passions about semicolons that varied from decade to decade and person to person. In this regard, they aren’t so different from us after all: when you looked at the semicolons on the front of this book, you probably felt something. Was it hate, like Paul Robinson? Anger? Love? Curiosity? Confusion? The diminutive semicolon can inspire great passion. As you’ll see in the chapters that follow, it always has.
* (#ulink_4e0789ec-108d-58a1-9824-8d0e45784ce3) Robert J. Richards at the University of Chicago. As of 28 March 2018, Bob’s entry on Wikipedia contains semicolon usage that I’m quite certain would rankle him: ‘Richards earned two PhDs; one in the History of Science from the University of Chicago and another in Philosophy from St Louis University.’ Bob, I swear it wasn’t me!
I
Deep History (#uc79102a7-99dd-584f-8c1d-f87afd9ebc52)
The Birth of the Semicolon
The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines both of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record punctuation testing and tinkering by fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a ‘cultural rebirth’ after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.
One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers.
In this snippet, you can see four of these brand-new semicolons. You might think you see eight, but beware! That semicolonish mark at the end of the fourth line from the bottom isn’t a semicolon, it’s an abbreviation for que, Latin for ‘and’. In this case, it’s helping to shorten neque, or ‘also not’. It appears elsewhere in the excerpt, always filling in the –ue part of a que. If you look closely, you’ll see that the dot-and-curve combination is raised higher up than a semicolon; it’s positioned on the same level as the words in the text because it’s shorthand for a word instead of a signal to pause.
Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. Jenson’s is a simple shooting star. We moderns have accumulated a host of characterful semicolons to choose from: Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat, slouched against the wall at a party. Gill Sans MT’s semicolon has perfect posture, while Didot’s puffs its chest out pridefully. (For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut* disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’.)
The semicolon had successfully colonised the letter cases of the best presses in Europe, but other newborn punctuation marks were not so lucky. The humanists tried out a lot of new punctuation ideas, but most of those marks had short lifespans. Some of the printed texts that appeared in the centuries surrounding the semicolon’s birth look as though they are written partially in secret code: they are filled with mysterious dots, dashes, swoops, and curlicues. There were marks for the minutest distinctions and the most specific occasions. For instance, there was once a punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark, which was a mirror-image version of the question mark. Why did the semicolon survive and thrive when other marks did not? Probably because it was useful. Readers, writers, and printers found that the semicolon was worth the trouble to insert. The rhetorical question mark, on the other hand, faltered and then fizzled out completely. This isn’t too surprising: does anyone really need a special punctuation mark to know when a question is rhetorical?
In humanist times, just as in our own, hand-wringing sages forecast a literary apocalypse precipitated by too-casual attitudes to punctuation. ‘It is not concealed from you how great a shortage there is of intelligent scribes in these times,’ wrote one French humanist to another,
and above all in transcribing those things which observe style to any degree; in which unless points and marks of distinctions, by which the style flows through the cola, commata, and periodi, are separated with more attentive diligence, that which is written is confused and barbarous … Which carelessness, in my opinion, has occurred chiefly since we have for a long time lacked eloquence, in which these things are necessary: the ancient manner of handwriting, therefore, in which the scribes of books (antiquarii) were gradually writing a perfect and correctly formed script with precise punctuation (certa distinctione) of clausulae and with notes of accentuation, has perished together with the art of expression (dictatu).
The entire art of expression – dead, because careless writers just couldn’t hack it when it came to punctuation. Well, I think we moderns might maintain that the art of expression gave us a few rather decent literary works even after the date of this fifteenth-century letter. But the lament of the French humanists is familiar, isn’t it? People can’t punctuate correctly, eloquence is slowly dying out. Plus ça change.
Still, a few bad-tempered complainants notwithstanding, most humanists believed that each writer should work out his punctuation for himself,† rather than employing a predetermined set of rules. A writer or an annotating reader was to exercise his own taste and judgment. This idea of punctuation as a matter of individual taste and style outlived the humanists: it stretched beyond the Latin texts that Manutius printed, crossing borders and oceans, and it survived as a way of thinking about the practice of punctuation well into the eighteenth century. When the topic of punctuation usage came up, a reader was likely to be advised that he should consider the punctuation marks analogous to rests in music, and deploy them according to the musical effect he wanted to achieve. How on earth did this idea of the writer as musician, which held on for hundreds of years, transform into our comparatively new expectation that writers must submit to rigid rules?
* (#ulink_2797f809-542b-5391-aa80-16d0570220bd) Back in the humanists’ day, the letters for a font were carved into steel bars. These were called ‘punches’. The technique was punch-cutting, and its practitioner a punch-cutter.
† (#ulink_3175491a-77e4-5659-b0f3-e0e185010a7b) In those days, it was usually a ‘him’, although there were of course exceptions.
II
The Science of Semicolons (#litres_trial_promo)
English Grammar Wars
Goold Brown, an American schoolteacher and grammar obsessive, had a lofty ambition: he wanted to produce ‘something like a complete grammar of the English language’. Twenty-seven years after first resolving to undertake this task, he finally published The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection* of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1851 printing of his own book.†
Where were all of these grammar books that Goold Brown surveyed coming from, and what had made them explode in number so suddenly, after several quiet centuries of minimal punctuation guidance for writers? A jaunt through some of the most popular grammar books of the nineteenth century will reveal that their authors were shrewd entrepreneurs taking advantage of a newly developed and highly lucrative market for education in English writing; in both America and Britain, access to public education expanded exponentially over the course of the nineteenth century, and with it, the opportunity to make a killing supplying schools with teaching materials. These early grammarians were also masters of the biting insult, as they jockeyed for position (and market share) with one another. And – perhaps most surprisingly – they were aspiring scientists. We have to understand the great shift these authors created in the way people thought about English grammar in order to understand the semicolon’s transformation: although these first professional grammarians sought clarity through rules, they ended up creating confusion, and the semicolon was collateral damage.
The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth, a bishop in the Church of England and a professor of poetry at Oxford,‡ used his platform to boldly announce that it was his aim to ‘lay down rules’ for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time – true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.
Even though Lowth didn’t hesitate to perpetrate brow-raising ‘corrections’ on writers who seem, well, pretty competent, he did still carry with him the legacy of the previous centuries’ emphasis on personal taste and style, and he reserved a place for individual discretion, particularly when it came to punctuation. For punctuation, he acknowledged, ‘few precise rules can be given, which will hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgment and taste of the writer’. As we’ve seen before, the marks of punctuation were analogous to the rests in a piece of music, and were to be applied as individual circumstances and preferences dictated. The comma thus was a pause shorter than the semicolon, and the semicolon was a pause shorter than the colon.
Shakespeare and Milton, both very improper!
Lowth’s book reigned supreme in both the UK and the US for a couple of decades, until an American grammarian, Lindley Murray, came along and decided he could probably sell a few books himself if he tweaked Lowth’s work a bit by increasing its structural precision and its rigidity. In order to rebuild the book in this way, he divided it into sections and numbered its rules. Murray retitled this new version English Grammar. To say that English Grammar was a blockbuster success is an understatement. The book went into twenty-four editions, reprinted by sixteen different American publishers between 1797 and 1870, and it sold so many copies that Murray was ‘the best-selling producer of books in the world’ between 1800 and 1840.
Lowth giving Shakespeare a little lesson in grammar and poetry writing.*
* (#ulink_f65349e9-8737-5b5c-9455-f1210bbe9ef3) You will notice an odd typographical quirk in Lowth’s text: the ‘Medial S’, which looks to the modern eye like an f but is to be read as an s. The Medial S can lead to some unintentionally seedy reading in books that are reprinted in facsimile edition, like Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, which contains a long section in which the author describes sucking air through a tube for an experiment.
Just as Murray found success renovating Lowth’s foundations, so Murray’s grammar had some additions nailed on by another upstart grammarian, Samuel Kirkham. Kirkham’s 1823 grammar gradually displaced its archetype. Where Murray’s grammar had gone into a dizzying twenty-four editions, Kirkham’s went into at least one hundred and ten. Kirkham won over readers by presenting a new system of parsing verbs, and by extending his predecessors’ criticisms of ‘false syntax’ in historical English. Even as Kirkham’s book represented a further step towards more rules and more systematisation, the very first edition of his grammar omitted punctuation entirely, on the grounds that it was part of prosody rather than grammar: in other words, punctuation was all about establishing rhythm, intonation, and stresses. This stance got Kirkham some critical reviews, however; as a consequence, subsequent editions covered punctuation – but only briefly, and only by nebulously describing punctuation marks as pauses of varying lengths. Thus, for the king of nineteenth-century grammar-book sales, punctuation remained a tool that writers could wield with a good bit of flexibility and discretion.
With sales of his book so high, Kirkham was in the spotlight. Not only did that open him up to attack, but it even allowed him to cultivate a proper nemesis. That nemesis was Goold Brown, the grammar surveyor in whose gargantuan book Kirkham was but one of hundreds of other people plying the same trade. But out of all those grammarians, Kirkham was the one who most got under Brown’s skin. As Brown saw it, Kirkham had played fast and loose with grammar, and cared more about his bottom line than about scientific scruples: he wanted to ‘veer his course according to the trade-wind’, Brown sniped. In Brown’s eyes, when Kirkham revised his grammar book to include punctuation, the additions represented not honest scholarly progression but mercenary modifications: ‘his whole design’ was a ‘paltry scheme of present income’. And – Brown added – Kirkham’s character was such that he was ‘filled with glad wonder at his own popularity’. Labelling Kirkham a quack and a plagiarist, Brown tore into his grammar book on page after page, pointing out its logical contradictions and omissions. Interspersed with these ad librum jabs are some choice ad hominem sucker punches. In one particularly efficient passage, Brown calls out Kirkham’s reasoning while also claiming that he didn’t write his own book and insinuating that he was too cheap to pay his ghostwriter adequately:
As a grammarian, Kirkham claims to be second only to Lindley Murray; and says, ‘Since the days of Lowth, no other work on grammar, Murray’s only excepted, has been so favorably received by the publick as his own. As a proof of this, he would mention, that within the last six years it has passed through fifty editions.’ – Preface to Elocution, p. 12. And, at the same time, and in the same preface, he complains, that, ‘Of all the labors done under the sun, the labors of the pen meet with the poorest reward.’ – Ibid., p. 5. This too clearly favours the report, that his books were not written by himself, but by others whom he hired. Possibly, the anonymous helper may here have penned, not his employer’s feeling, but a line of his own experience. But I choose to ascribe the passage to the professed author, and to hold him answerable for the inconsistency.
Kirkham answered Brown’s complaints about his boasting with … more boasting, this time underlined with populist rhetoric aimed at his American readers:
What! A book have no merit, and yet be called for at the rate of sixty thousand copies a year! What a slander is this upon the public taste! What an insult to the understanding and discrimination of the good people of these United States! According to this reasoning, all the inhabitants of our land must be fools, except one man, and that man is GOOLD BROWN!
Brown bit back, pointing out that Lord Byron got paid a lot more for Childe Harold than Milton did for Paradise Lost; but would anyone say Byron was the greater literary genius?
Brown and Kirkham may have pitted themselves against one another,§ but they (along with their contemporaries) agreed on one thing: grammar was to be viewed not as a mere matter of personal taste or style, but now as a coherent system of knowledge. Accordingly, they termed grammar a ‘science’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a new wave of grammarians began to argue that grammar wasn’t just a science in this broad sense of schematic knowledge, but a science in the narrower sense in which we use the word nowadays. To these new grammarians, their field was analogous to the natural sciences.
In staking this claim, the new grammarian-scientists were almost certainly reacting to protests from parents of schoolchildren and school officials, who claimed that the study of grammar was boring and ineffectual; pupils’ time was better spent studying the natural sciences, which were exciting and taught real skills. Complaints about the mind-numbing uselessness of grammar surfaced as early as 1827, came to a boil by 1850, and persisted through the rest of the nineteenth century. If grammarians wanted to stay relevant and sell those lucrative grammar books to schools and their pupils, they needed to answer to carping parents and officials. In a few cases, grammarians peddled their wares with novelty methods and titles that smacked of circus-barker enthusiasm: British grammarian George Mudie perhaps epitomised this trend with his 1841 book, The Grammar of the English Language truly made Easy by the Invention of Three Hundred Moveable Parts of Speech. Truly, what could be easier or more fun than 300 moveable parts of speech?¶
More often, however, grammarians answered to complaints about grammar’s relative dullness and uselessness with rather ingenious rhetoric: grammar, they proposed, was a method of teaching students the art of scientific observation without requiring expensive or complex scientific apparatus. In service of this goal of teaching scientific skills, grammarians resolved to employ careful observation of English, because this gave them a way to use the methods of science to refine grammar; and they imported into their grammars some of the conventions of science textbooks, such as diagrams.
Isaiah J. Morris, ‘offensive’ from the very first page.
Rebel American grammarian Isaiah J. Morris emphasised the first approach – careful observation of English – in his 1858 Morris’s grammar: A philosophical and practical grammar of the English language, dialogically and progressively arranged; in which every word is parsed according to its use.** Morris came out swinging from the start, distancing himself from reigning champions of grammar like the bestselling Samuel Kirkham. Kirkham and his ilk had relied on Greek and Latin grammar to come up with rules for English, and as a result, Morris fumed, they had littered the true ‘laws of language’ with ‘errors’ and ‘absurdities’, which Morris was now left to ‘expose and explode’. Correcting these mistakes was a moral obligation: ‘Shall we roll sin under our tongues as a sweet morsel?’ Morris demanded. ‘It must be sin to teach what we know to be error.’ In order to cleanse English grammars of these corruptions, Morris devoted the preface of his grammar to eviscerating the stale precepts of his predecessors. He knew that shredding such venerable grammarians would shock his readers: ‘If the truth be disagreeable,’ he shrugged, ‘I choose to be offensive.’††
Morris offered a way to get beyond the deference to Latin and Greek that he believed had made earlier grammarians so error-prone: he advocated observing English carefully, and then making rules based on those observations, rather than trying to squeeze English grammar into frameworks designed for dead languages.‡‡ Grammar rules would then arise directly from scrutinising English in action – and conveniently enough, the study of grammar would thus acquire for itself some of the virtues of the natural sciences that were being championed in the press, where commentators regularly argued that students were inherently inclined towards the observation and study of natural phenomena.
Grammarians had a second strategy to advance against critics who complained about the inferiority of grammar when compared to the natural sciences: the sentence diagram. Any good science textbook had diagrams, and if grammar was to be a science, it surely needed a system of schematic illustrations as well. And so in 1847, a grammarian named Stephen Clark introduced a system of diagrams designed to relate to the ‘Science of Language’ as maps did to geography, and figures to geometry and arithmetic. (It might sound odd to the modern reader to think of geography and geometry as natural sciences like physics and chemistry, but plenty of people back in Clark’s days thought of them that way, and even people who didn’t categorise those areas of study as ‘sciences’ believed the two disciplines were essential for the study of both the natural sciences and other respected fields like philosophy. And, unlike grammar, the mathematical sciences were considered ‘perfect’ and ‘useful’.)
Clark’s diagrams often made use of Bible verses: might as well pack in a few fearsome reminders about the powers of the Almighty for those schoolchildren misbehaving in the back of the class, after all.
The diagrams were a popular addition to grammar books, and held on for a long time. Although they’ve fallen out of pedagogical fashion these days, some readers may remember grammar classes from their childhoods that relied heavily on diagramming sentences on the blackboard. I certainly do, although I don’t recall ever having to produce anything quite so comically elaborate as this humdinger.
Clark, who invented the sentence-diagramming technique to visualise language, did his best to make the rest of his grammar follow the definitive-sounding, principle- and fact-heavy aesthetic of the natural sciences in other ways, too. Clark’s rules were set up in an outline form, which Clark borrowed from his contemporary Peter Bullions. Bullions had used outlines to show his readers ‘leading principles, definitions, and rules’. Those rules were to be displayed ‘in larger type’ to emphasise their importance; and exceptions to the rules were printed in type that got smaller and smaller the further away from an ironclad principle they crept.
In Bullions’s nesting-doll fonts a fundamental tension is writ large: the conflicting demands of rules and taste. Bullions wrote that the purpose of punctuation was ‘to convey to the reader an exact sense, and assist him in the proper delivery’. He warned, however, in a font two points smaller, that ‘the duration of the pauses must be left to the taste of the reader or speaker’. Nevertheless, he then provided twenty-five rules and exceptions for the comma alone. These rules were then followed by yet another disclaimer in even tinier font than the first: ‘The foregoing rules will, it is hoped, be found comprehensive; yet there may be some cases in which the student must rely on his own judgment.’ Bullions seems to be equivocating, vacillating between committing to rules on the one hand, and capitulating to taste on the other.
Bullions and the tension between rules and taste.
Bullions’s dilemma was every nineteenth-century grammarian’s nightmare: how could it be possible to give useful rules for punctuation, while at the same time acknowledging that those rules couldn’t describe every valid approach to punctuating a text? Whether a grammarian tried to police English with the laws of ancient Latin and Greek, or instead to derive his principles from examination of contemporary English in action, he could not escape the tension between the rigidity of rules and the flexibility of usage. Even if English writers’ actual practices were taken into account and described in the rules, once laid down, the rules couldn’t shift, while usage inevitably did. The grammarian was necessarily torn between trying (and inevitably failing) to anticipate every kind of usage, as Peter Bullions did with his twenty-five comma rules; or giving rules so general they were scarcely rules at all, the strategy Robert Lowth opted for with his specification that punctuation marks were successively longer pauses.§§ Mega-meta-grammarian Goold Brown, in >his exhaustive Grammar of English Grammars, attempted to honey this problem with a bit of aspirational rhetoric:
Some may begin to think that in treating of grammar we are dealing with something too various and changeable for the understanding to grasp; a dodging Proteus of the imagination, who is ever ready to assume some new shape, and elude the vigilance of the inquirer. But let the reader or student do his part; and, if he please, follow us with attention. We will endeavor, with welded links, to bind this Proteus, in such a manner that he shall neither escape from our hold, nor fail to give to the consulter an intelligible and satisfactory response. Be not discouraged, generous youth.
Brown’s labours may have been Herculean in scope, but they were still insufficient to solidify the fluid laws of grammar. Whenever grammarians tried to pin down punctuation marks with rules, they inevitably slipped their restraints, no matter whether they were shackled with a few broad rules or a hundred narrow ones. This Proteus didn’t stop shifting shapes, it was just that now he had a heavy chain awkwardly dangling from his heels as he did so. The thorny relationship between rules and usage came to play a major role in the fate of our hero, the semicolon.
* (#ulink_3f37195b-b7d6-5337-b871-6ca361556e94) I’m surprised he could bring himself to use a selection. Brown was a thorough guy, the type of person who dated his copy of Churchill’s English Grammar ‘AD 1824’, lest anyone mistakenly think he might have bought it in 1824 BC.
† (#ulink_3f37195b-b7d6-5337-b871-6ca361556e94) My copy of Brown’s compendium is a menacing leather-bound brick measuring 9¾ inches by 6½ inches by 3 inches and tipping the scales at 4 pounds 15 ounces. It’s caused my checked baggage to violate airline weight allowances on three occasions.
‡ (#ulink_9f4bd59c-bcda-550f-a283-969587db54c5) Lowth, obviously, was English – unlike Brown, the American meta-grammarian who opened this chapter. I’ll bounce back and forth across the Atlantic throughout this chapter, but not without reason. In the nineteenth century, the most influential grammar books enjoyed the same freedom to be bought, taught, and sold on both sides of the pond. This makes a good deal of sense when you think about it: in matters of grammar, differences between British and American English are far slighter than in matters of vocabulary and idiom. In this respect, the distinction between American and British English is analogous to distinctions you’ll have encountered within Britain itself: whether you put your bacon on a cob, bap, barm, bun, or roll, you were taught the same grammar rules in primary school as anyone you meet from another region. And that’s not the only reason nineteenth-century grammar books were able to slip across borders so easily; frequently the matters on which American and British punctuation have come to differ weren’t even mentioned in the books. Peter Bullions, for instance, a New Yorker whose grammar had one of the longer sections on punctuation available at the time, doesn’t say a word about where punctuation should fall relative to quotation marks. Whether you want your full stops and commas included in (American style) or excluded from (British style) the quotation mark’s embrace, you’d find nothing in many of the original grammar rule books to help or hinder you. Even Noah Webster, who advocated fiercely for a uniquely American language befitting a unique new government, didn’t distinguish between American and British punctuation styles in his 1822 grammar book. And Robert Lowth, the Englishman we’re now discussing, used full stops after abbreviations like ‘Mr.’, which we now think of as American-style punctuation.
§ (#ulink_622c2619-b345-5eb5-94b1-463c1671172f) When Brown wasn’t tearing up the work of other grammarians, he made his own constructive suggestions for reform. One of my favourites of his ideas was to rename the exclamation point the ‘eroteme’, since it is a mark of passion. (From the Greek έρως [eros], meaning ‘love’ or ‘desire’.)
¶ (#ulink_35e44134-e2a3-50d4-953e-09389a0e602a) This title sounded so ridiculous to me that I was convinced it was a joke the first time I saw a reference to it in the long-defunct London newspaper The Penny Satirist. But it turns out that the book is very much real and Mudie was very much serious, and in typical nineteenth-century grammarian style, he talked plenty of trash about his peers’ ostentation and the inefficiency of their methods.
