Success and the Semicolon

Jill Biden is a friend to the semicolon. Here's how she defined success in USA Today:

Q. You've taught in community colleges for 16 years. How do you define success?
A. Success is when my students have developed confidence and self-esteem that can help them achieve their goals. It's important that they can write a research paper, structure a logical argument in writing and determine when to use a comma versus a semicolon, but most important is that they emerge with a sense of confidence.

SPOGG smells a fan letter. (Note: Fan letters at this very moment smell a bit like feet. SPOGG probably spent too much time in the sun yesterday.)

An Ode to the Semicolon

Jan Freeman has a nice piece on Boston.com about "the quiet generosity of the semicolon."

While such words would be a dream come true to some, what we liked best were the description of how to use a semicolon, and the example of where one was used in a monument instead of a comma. Does this make us nerdy? Or just very excited for the upcoming National Punctuation Day?

Read her column here.

Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon

Reta sends in this fascinating piece from Slate on the semicolon, its history, and its questionable present:

Has modern life killed the semicolon?
By Paul Collins
Posted Friday, June 20, 2008, at 4:51 PM ET

When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."

French passions over the semicolon are running high once again. An April Fool's hoax this year by the online publication Rue89 claimed that the Nicolas Sarkozy government planned to demand "at least three semicolons per page in official administrative documents." Parliamentarian Benoist Apparu was in on the joke—"The disappearance of the semicolon in Eastern France is absolutely dramatic," he gamely proclaimed—and linguist Alain Rey (barely) kept a straight face for a video calling Frenchmen to arms.

Read more...

The semicolon is hardly dead. Though it appears more commonly as part of a wink than as a punctuation mark that links two related sentences, how many other punctuation marks have merited articles in the New York Times, Slate, Rue89 and Encarta? ;-)

Mark our words. It will enjoy a comeback even better than the one John Travolta made in "Pulp Fiction." We just need to find the punctuation equivalent of Uma Thurman so that the two may dance.

Something Fishy About This

Pardon the hideous scan, but we couldn't find our scissors. This is a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish bag, scrunched under the lid of our scanner. Note the marketing slogan: Think differently!

Does that sound familiar? It should. It's a ripoff of Apple's "Think Different" campaign that irked so many grammarians way back when.

Here's the thing, though. Apple's campaign is better. While it's true that we use adverbs to modify verbs, applying that rule slavishly here undercuts the inspirational message of the ad.

If you tell someone to "think differently," then you're telling him his current mental mode isn't working. Is that a way to sell a product? We think not, unless insulting your customers is your plan. You can probably get away with this with children, who are used to taking orders from adults all day long. Ah, school. Yet another link between fish and kids.

When you're frying bigger fish, though, telling your customers to "think different" is another matter. Here, "different" works idiomatically, if not strictly grammatically. Let's think of another example along these lines: "Think green." You'd never say "think greenly" if you're encouraging someone to think with an environmental focus. Likewise the "buy local" campaign wouldn't mean the same thing if it read "buy locally." The first means buy produce grown in your area. The second means to buy it at a nearby store, instead of online or through a remote catalog.

Our language is flexible enough that you can communicate a big concept with just two words when you know the idiom. If you ignore this, you might end up saying something you really don't want to say, even if it's perfectly grammatical.

In its defense, Pepperidge Farm really is encouraging its little customers to think about things in different ways--if you click to enlarge the photo, you can see that they've laid out fish silhouettes to spell a name and to make a cello. It's a fine lesson for kids, even if "think creatively" or "think imaginatively" would have been the more direct ways of delivering that message.

Meanwhile, we're sending mental instructions to the marketers to "think semicolon" next time. The sentence "Be open minded, what do you see below?" requires a semicolon where the comma stands.

Presidential Candidates Pontificate on Punctuation

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran something we wish we'd thought of:

Effective writing: If presidential candidates debated use of punctuation
By STEPHEN WILBURS, Special to the Star Tribune

March 16, 2008

Wouldn't it be fun to hear the two Democratic candidates and the Republican candidate debate one another? To keep things balanced, we've asked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to join. Rather than discuss the future of our nation, they will address the issue on everyone's mind: correct grammar and punctuation:

Q What are your thoughts regarding the appropriate use of the semicolon?

Sen. Barack Obama: Our movement is real, change is coming to America and the time has come to use semicolons appropriately.

Sen. John McCain: Although I've never minded the role of the underdog, we must get used to the idea that semicolons are the front- running punctuation mark.

Huckabee: A lot of people have been trying to say this is a two-mark contest between semicolons and colons. Well, you know what? It is. And I like them both.

Read the rest of this story....

Loving the Semicolon

Erin McKean of the Oxford English Dictionary has founded the Semicolon Appreciation Society. SPOGG is enthused.

The Semicolon's Day in the Sun

Just as we were working on a defense of the semicolon for the online encyclopedia Encarta, the New York Times beat us to the punch:

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Read more...

Our Favorite Basketball Player

We always loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When we were little and culturally insensitive, his name reminded us of some sort of delicious soup. Now that we know better than to admit such things, we love him for his enthusiasm for punctuation and grammar:

Here's how he's quoted in the Los Angeles Times:

"I loved school, loved UCLA," Abdul-Jabbar says. "I remember, in an English class taught by a Mr. Lindstrom, we were asked to do essays and he said he would read the best three to the entire class. He read the first two, then said he was going to read the best one, and it was mine.

"It was right then that I thought maybe I could do this, that maybe I had what it takes."He also played at UCLA for John Wooden, always more English teacher than coach."We'd sit on the bus and talk about when to use a colon and when a semicolon," Abdul-Jabbar says. "We'd argue the difference between "like" and "as if."

A Midsentence Crisis

Forget the midlife crisis. The problem we're having today in the New York Times is a midsentence crisis:

It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.

“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”

What is that semicolon doing there? We're sort of guessing, but we believe the author meant to stick it after the first her. Like this:

It was not that her husband no longer loved her; she said he told her he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.

“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”

Or maybe the attribution got in the way:

It was not that her husband no longer loved her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.

“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”

We're half expecting that sentence to fold itself into a red Porsche convertible and drive around town with a 23-year-old trophy girlfriend. A midsentence crisis—there's nothing sadder. And everyone knows you're bald under that baseball cap.

Here's the Beef

Newspaper reporters are taught to shun the serial comma. So, in a sequence of three things--apples, oranges and pears--the newspaper reporter would NOT put a comma in front of the and (even though someone writing a book would).

This is the only explanation we can give for this sentence, which is positively screaming for a comma (and maybe the sort of surgery that separates conjoined twins):

The matter is not simply that his writers were on the picket line on a primary eve that saw both a formerly fat former governor of Arkansas introduce a sandwich called the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel, the presently zany former governor of Alaska, advise an audience at Phillips Exeter Academy to smoke marijuana, as if boarding-school students needed such encouragement.

The sandwich is called "the Huckaburger." It's not "the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel," even though that's how anyone not from a town called Hope would read it. When a sentence sprouts a complete second half, you need to insert a comma before the conjunction.

Sometimes, when you have two complete sentences joined by a conjunction, you can drop the conjunction and insert a semicolon, but not in this particular example, or on Slate in general because its former editor, Michael Kinsley, hates semicolons. That's awfully rich for a guy who was still wearing handsome little gold-rimmed spectacles in the 1990s.

Semicolons: Why All the Hate?

We all do regrettable things when we're young, and in school. Patricia Bobek, however, might never live this one down:

Semicolons Sever the Spirit of a Sentence
Patricia Bobek / Columnist

Semicolons: What an absolute waste of punctuation. Who really uses the semicolon anymore? You do? Really? Well then: You are a square.

Talk about being something it’s not. Semicolons, you are not a colon: You do not introduce the logical consequence to the fact stated before or introduce a description. You are like the Donald Trump in a world full of people with hair. Just because you comb that little bit of hair forward, semicolon, doesn’t mean one day you will be caught in a disastrous wind and it won’t blow right off. Global warming is watching and waiting for you, semicolon. The jig is up.

Read more: http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=14957

Maureen Corrigan on the Semicolon

Behold the power of a punctuation mark:

"The semicolon is my psychological metaphor, my mascot. It’s the punctuation mark that qualifies, hesitates, and ties together ideas and parts of a life that shoot off in different directions. I think my reliance on the semicolon signifies that I want to hold onto my background – honestly, without sentimentality or embarrassment – and yet, also transcend it. I come from, and still partly reside in, a world where most people, including my own parents, didn’t, and still don’t, read or hear what I have to say about books because they are oblivious to NPR, The New York Times, and all the other educated middle- and upper-class outlets where popular conversations about culture and literature take place."

From Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, by Maureen Corrigan

The Semicolon: Behind Closed Doors

We found this sentence today in a story about open offices vs. the sort with closing doors, and had ourselves a bit of a laugh:

"Being a literary editor requires considerable privacy so that we can discuss copy with some of the very highest level authors in the land. [SPOGG: "The mid-list authors, we don't care so much about..."] Seemingly petty things, like whether something should be a comma or a semicolon, ensures the quality. That simply could not happen in an open-plan office."

This is because the sort of high-maintenance git who can only talk about punctuation behind closed doors is the sort of person other people laugh at. It would be hard to get work done with people giggling all the time.

Also, "ensures" should be "ensure." Petty things -- such as subject and verb agreement -- ensure quality.

The article...

Punktuation Comedy

That the Swedish band "The Tiny" misused a semicolon on the title of their album "Starring; Someone Like You" isn't what amuses us here.

Nor is the fact that Amazon.com has corrected this error in its description of the album.

Rather, that this punctuation error has so angered the reviewer at Punknews.org. Who knew punkers were so into, er, punktuation?

Read the review of Starring; Someone Like You

Someone Hates the Semicolon

From the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:

I don't mean to brag, but I myself am an English major, and I've been known to get a little wild myself. At a recent party, to get things going, I said in a loud voice, "You know what I think of the semicolon?"

After a dramatic pause, I declared, "I think it's a worthless, clumsy, trashy mark with no redeeming stylistic value."

Read on...

SPOGG thinks the animus toward the semicolon is ridiculous. Of course it has stylistic value. One can use it to join two closely related sentences, rather than inserting a full stop between them. It also makes it easy to separate items in elaborate lists. It's more formal than a long dash -- it's like a cocktail dress as compared to khaki pants. Both have perfectly good uses, and one of the joys of writing is finding just the right word, sentence structure, and punctuation mark for the job.

This is Scheinola...

We must stop reading Adam Schein's prose, because Fox's Scheinola is starting to look like that other, less-polite word that starts with s. Today he writes the following:

Obviously it is way too early to get into forecasts. [But he's going to do it anyway.] Seattle is a very good team; the Rams had a good draft and good free agency period; and I'm Rollin with Nolan and the Niners.

But I just love the direction Arizona is headed in, with its new impact players in the draft, its solid free agency period, and most especially, the
appointment of Whisenhunt and his staff to make it sing and maximize the
talented players they already have in the desert.

Now, we love a semicolon as much, if not more, than the next guy. Schein's a bit liberal with them in the first paragraph. Easy, buddy! Semicolons are the bench-warmers of punctuation marks. You only play them when you need to.

Worse, though, is his second paragraph, where the team is simultaneously an "it" and a "they." Adam, Adam, Adam... either go with the singular American pronoun or the plural British one. If you do both, people will think you're Canadian or something. Is that the football league you really want to be covering?

Our recommendation to you: shorter sentences. These are the baby steps of prose. Once you can master a single noun and a single verb, we give you permission to insert adjectives and recursive phrases.

As it is, your random recursiveness just has us cursing. Scheinola!