Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life

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.*

* 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.

* 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.

† 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.

‡ 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.

§ 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’.)

¶ 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.

** Believe it or not, this is a relatively pithy title for a nineteenth-century book; some of them really took the term title page to be an imperative to fill the whole sheet.

†† Morris is probably my favourite grammarian. What can I say? I like a sharp-spoken rebel.

‡‡ Morris, as a ‘new grammarian’ committed to observation of English, left Pope and Milton alone, unlike his predecessors. Instead of correcting the classics, the new generation of grammarians decided to amend each other’s work instead, sometimes to absurd and comical effect. Alfred Ayres, a grammarian and elocutionist who edited an 1893 edition of The English Grammar of William Cobbett, praised the book as ‘probably the most readable grammar ever written’. Nonetheless, Ayres demurred, Cobbett’s grammar had become a little bit dated in the fifty years that had passed since it was first printed. Ayres, as editor, felt it was his duty to repair Cobbett’s mistakes by inserting bracketed corrections throughout the book. Thus Ayres turned this example sentence from Cobbett’s original: ‘And that it was this which made that false which would otherwise have been, and which was intended to be, true!’ into: ‘And that it was this which [that] made that false which [that] would otherwise have been, and which [that] was intended to be, true!’ So much for Cobbett’s vaunted ‘readability’.

§§ People like Robert Lowth are typically termed ‘prescriptivists’, and grammarians like Isaiah Morris ‘descriptivists’. Prescriptivists give rules about how language ought to be, while descriptivists want to observe and describe language. These categories are unfairly extreme in the case of nineteenth-century grammarians. They give the impression that supposed prescriptivists (like Lowth and his adherents) laid down laws without recognising that a writer’s taste was still important, and they give the impression that supposed descriptivists (Morris and his ilk) just described language in action without trying to give any laws. The truth is much more complicated. All of these grammarians, negotiating the competing demands of rules and personal taste, were much more nuanced than dumping them into prescriptivist or descriptivist camps would indicate. In fact, one of the things that’s most fascinating about reading grammars from Lowth’s and Morris’s times is how plain it is on the face of the texts that the grammarians were struggling with this fundamental problem of grammar.

III

Sexy Semicolons

In early spring of 1857, a writer for the Chicago Daily Tribune took a stroll through the streets of Chicago, making a note of facial hair trends for an article in the paper. Particularly popular was a moustache combined with a small goatee: ‘Forty-three wore the moustache with a fancy tuft upon the chin, but with smooth cheeks; looking as if a semicolon was the best representation of their idea of facial adornment.’

The comparison was apt: semicolons were trendy in any form, follicular or literary.

For those of you accustomed to thinking about punctuation as subject to rules, it probably sounds odd to suggest that punctuation usage could be beholden to shifts in fashion. One of the virtues of rules would be to insulate us from whims and fancies. But even the originators of rule-based punctuation guides, the grammarians we encountered in the previous chapter, copped to punctuation’s trendiness. As we’ve seen, they were conflicted about how best to negotiate the tension between rules and actual usage. As a result of their examination of usage, grammarians became keen observers of the punctuation whims of writers. The semicolon was on the rise in the 1800s, and its popularity might have been linked to the unfashionableness of two other marks, the parenthesis and the colon. By the early 1800s, parentheses were already so last century, inspiring T. O. Churchill’s 1823 grammar to coolly pronounce that ‘the parenthesis is now generally exploded as a deformity’. It got worse: three years later, the parenthesis had gone from Quasimodo to quasi ghost, with Rufus Nutting’s Practical Grammar and Bradford Frazee’s Improved Grammar both deeming it ‘nearly obsolete’. The curved marks that humanist thinker Desiderius Erasmus had romantically called ‘little moons’ (lunulae) had crashed down to earth. By the mid-1800s, writers were also snubbing the colon: Oliver Felton’s 1843 grammar fobbed it off with ‘The COLON is now so seldom used by good writers, that rules for its use are >unnecessary.’ Seven years later, The Common School Journal gravely advised that when it came to colons, ‘we should not let children use them’, and ‘should advise advanced scholars seldom to use them’.