The days of the semicolon are numbered; that is, if a clique of uppity French intellectuals get their way. (For the best English-language post on the subject, check out Jon Henley’s thorough reporting here.)
Those out to axe the semicolon cry out that it’s a worthless piece of pretentious punctuational pageantry. Kurt Vonnegut even went so far to say, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Those who defend the semicolon often retort that, above all, it lends a little bit of elegance.
We live in the age of short sentences – an age of blogging, emails and SMS. Serial subordinate clauses, multi-tiered lists and similar ilk, have been democratized into declarative bursts. It’s not just “Say what you mean and mean what you say,” but “Say what you mean and say it in such a way that your mother, father, sister, uncle, great grandmother and the guy standing in line behind you can understand it.” And, more often that not, we are communicating to anyone in the world with access to the Internet.
On one hand, I’m glad when communication is the primary point of writing. As PR professionals, we know that if we can’t make the message understandable by the target recipients, we’ve wasted our time and our client’s money. Moreover, just because you write economically doesn’t mean that you can’t make it artistic, languid and compelling.
But I love those increasingly rare features and editorials that play around with sentence structure, that dare to use language that readers may sometimes strain a little to understand. It can be good when someone says something in such a way that it causes a pause, a reread or a search through the dictionary; every once in a while, we’d be the better for it.
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