Save Our Semicolons!

 

I am no curmudgeon, no yardstick-wielding prescriptive grammarian.  As an English teacher, my job is to empower, rather than make students cower:  English class shouldn't be a game of "gotcha."  Language exists to convey meaning and, if it fails or works against its purpose, we alter it.  I get that.  But even I have my limits.

Sensationalistic journalism is one of them--especially when it targets the very language it must use to make its point.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, I read that the surprisingly modern standard of punctuation may conceivably become a relic of the past.  We will evolve and semicolons, for instance, will merely be trinkets of small tribes of pedantic academics.  One would presume that future college freshmen who know what's good for them would shower these baubles generously on their professors and receive compensation in the form of further inflated grades.

Surprisingly, and mysteriously, the article's author plans "to keep handling apostrophes in accordance with the principles [he] was shown as a child," despite their impending obsolescence as mere nugatory visual phenomena.  Why?  The writer seems alarmingly phlegmatic.

Now mind you, I'm not one to insist that you throw in a comma wherever one might fit.  As a matter of fact, great writers can take or leave punctuation as it suits them.  But that's because they're great writers.  In opening his Portrait of a Lady, for instance, Henry James could pen as concise and functional a sentence as any, completely devoid of intermediate punctuation:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Observe how the prepositional and participial phrases flow without the need for interposition.  A great writer does not use punctuation as a crutch; punctuation serves to regulate the rhythms of speech, to clarify--or, if needed, to create--ambiguity.  Likewise, without the subtle power of punctuation, the nuances of James's much-famed lengthier sentences would have been lost. Punctuation is indeed largely a visual phenomenon, but what great writer after Homer (what Wall Street Journalist, for that matter) doesn't rely on the visual, the more enduring means of transmission?  Observe the effects of standard punctuation on a later sentence from James's Portrait:

The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure. 

The future?

Now imagine each comma removed, each colon and semicolon replaced with a period, and no parentheses or dashes given.  Not the same; the spell is broken.  Punctuation, in its standard form, refines the writer's meaning in a way that, when indicated only verbally, seems clunky by comparison.  We could, perhaps, imagine the subtleties of James if the only tool he had was a period.  But, like readers of ancient manuscripts, we would be spending much of our time working at the surface--punctuating in our minds--before having time to appreciate the fuller effect.

Bottom line: it's a step backwards, if we abandon the semicolon, the apostrophe, and who knows what else:  If we end up with only a dot to sort our thoughts, we will be worse off.  Yet I find it hard to believe that the wave of the future is to abandon the punctuation we have developed over centuries, just as we "abandoned" the codex for scrolling computer text.  As long as people read, and long to read the writings of the past, they will learn--or teach themselves--the appropriate punctuation.