“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Who is this strange creature? This limping, asymmetric anomaly?
The unfashionable singleton who leaves the party, that’s who he is. A rejected, unwanted soul, crawling home with his tail pointing west and his head a disconnected dot floating hopelessly in the air. As awkward and unnecessary as riding side-saddle. An easy target, an arrhythmic stroke of the pen, sought out by the grammarian bullies, a pushover for being neither one thing nor the other. For being a jumped-up comma, dying to be promoted to a full stop, or for being the half-hearted full stop that can’t bear to bring down its jackboot on the sentence underfoot. Death postponed, either way. He’s the divisive, indecisive creature that looks both ways, two-faced and unreliable. Gets what he deserves.
It has gone out of favour, the semicolon. Early on in Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities there is a paragraph comprising two sentences, 302 words, and eleven semicolons, a supreme demonstration of the semicolon’s unique power. (Reproduced in full below, if you’re interested. If you want to get published today, don’t do that.) Writing style has moved on, fashions change, and as our attention spans have become shorter, so have sentences. It seems the allure of the semicolon is understood more by dead writers than by current ones; that is, to be able to enjoy the best of both worlds, where sentences can be long and short at the same time.
The vociferous left hemisphere of your brain will not be happy to hear that. In fact, it won’t be able to compute it at all. In Iain McGilchrist’s brilliant tour de force, The Master and his Emissary, he argues that, although the old myth of the two hemispheres each having their own, unique function has been rightly debunked and that in fact both are involved in the brain’s processing of all aspects of the world, it is nevertheless quite clear they do so in distinct and remarkably different ways. The right hemisphere laughs at a joke, the left hemisphere analyses it. The left hemisphere likes to split the world into manageable chunks, focusing on individual details, whereas the right hemisphere sees everything as one, rising above to behold the bigger picture. In doing so the right hemisphere is able to see what connects those chunks, and understands those connections as being, if anything, the more crucial part of the whole. The “betweenness” between things is, for the right hemisphere, to recognise some fundamental truth about the world, which (to the frustration of the left hemisphere) can’t be put into words. It understands that relationships are prior to the things that are related, and brings them into being. The right hemisphere is also comfortable with ambiguity. Indeed it thrives on it. To have a double meaning is not to divide but to connect – this is what the right hemisphere does. Meanwhile, the left hemisphere grimaces, raises its shoulders with a “WTF?”, and because it thinks it’s in charge, ridicules the ambiguity and replaces it with flat, concrete certainty. The right hemisphere understands the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, whereas the left hemisphere thinks the parts are… well, it doesn’t get any further than that, it just thinks parts are parts.
A full stop divides and rules. It forbids two sentences to become one. A comma, the opposite. A semicolon, however, being a smart chap, can do both, a skill the left hemisphere can’t cope with, finding two contradictory things existing at the same time to be illogical and therefore unacceptable. But all the while, the right hemisphere sits on the porch, beer in hand, rocking gently in its rocking chair and nodding sagely; no need to process, no need to “understand”, it simply sees through the contradiction and ambiguity to find the ghost in the mist. Two sentences really do become one. In the mathematical world of the right hemisphere, one plus one makes one.
McGilchrist claims that, when looking at the broad sweep, the left and right hemispheres have each had their own periods of ascendency at different times throughout history, but the 20th and 21st centuries have seen a rise in left-hemisphere power to the point of tyranny, possibly irreversibly so. This suits the analysis of grammatical style (or the analysis of anything) because it involves the taking apart of objects and examining their individual parts to see how they work, so when confronted by an equation that doesn’t add up (1 + 1 = 1), the left hemisphere refuses to engage. It can’t cope with the semicolon and so brushes it aside, consigning it, literally, to history. (Of course, it raises its head above the parapet from time to time, but is slapped back down as being nothing more than a way of showing, as Kurt Vonnegut would mischievously have it, that you’ve been to college. The semicolon is too clever by half; only smart-Alecs use semicolons. Actually, Vonnegut did use semicolons – though admittedly not that many.)
No doubt semicolons will continue to be dismissed by some writers as merely pointless affectations. But I love the little fellow, his capacity to open a grammatical window and let fresh air flow in, giving the reader time to fill their lungs, a gilded gap in the hedge between two fields of honeyed corn. A successful marriage requires independence, and for independence to work it requires connectedness; for that, nothing else but a semicolon will do.
From Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cites:
Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.