The semicolon is a unique punctuation mark with an interesting backstory and a fascinating history.
In fact, there has been a whole book written on this vaunted punctuation mark.
Cecelia Watson, author of Semicolon:The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark writes “The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated. In this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink.”
It turns out that the modern semicolon was invented in Venice, in 1494, by the printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. Yet for much of history, this mark had no strictly defined function. The semicolon acted like a musical notation, allowing for a pause somewhere between the beat of a comma and a colon. This explains why it has such a mongrel design. Much later in literary history, the semicolon’s usages were systematized.
Duels have been fought over the semicolon and ambiguous usage has led to a determination of war crimes. In the first instance, two University of Paris law professors clashed in 1837 over a question of semicolon usage. They settled this serious punctuation matter with a duel. And in 1945, an errant semicolon that found its way into the definition of war crimes in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal temporarily halted the prosecution of captured Nazi war criminals until the ambiguous sentence was clarified and the usage removed.
There’s much more in the book. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review of this interesting book:
Semicolons are not your workaday periods and commas. They belong to the family of trills and volutes; they exist for the sake of complexity, beauty, subtle connections. Cardinal virtues, I’d say, but Watson traces the warring (and gendered) camps of prose style — a fixation on clarity and directness versus a curled sensibility, one interested in the fertile territories of ambiguity.
Watson covers impressive ground in this short book, skittering back and forth like a sandpiper at the shores of language’s Great Debates. There are fascinating forays into how grammarians “created a market for their rules,” the strange history of diagramming sentences and the racial politics of so-called standard English.
Tomorrow, more information about how to use semicolons in your writing.
Good luck and keep writing!