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My life as a semicolon; well, sort of…

I am beginning to realize that I am unusual -or at least an unwitting anachronism; I have lived, in a way, most of my life as an aspiring semicolon. It’s not something at which I have aimed or anything; it’s just that I seem to be able to fit words quite comfortably on either side of one. In a way, I suppose I am one of the lucky ones; I know where I belong; I have the luxury of being a dual citizen, however old fashioned I am regarded by the youth who no longer seem to know the names, let alone the uses of punctuation in their Emojied texts.

Although I even write letters in semicoloned cursive on occasion to surprise people, they seem quite special to those who receive them; they are difficult for those accustomed to texts, however. But I am of the pre-Emoji era; I fell into a crowd of semicolons -okay, tripped– when I was quite young. I think I was always alert to punctuations; I fancied myself a writer in around Grade 6 or 7 and although I received very little encouragement from my teachers at the time, I decided to punish their insouciance with a barrage of inconvenient puncta -or whatever you call the plural of daring punctuational experiments; I did this largely to inconvenience whoever was marking the assignments we used to have to hand in at the end of each month or so. Because when I got them back they were invariably infected with red-pencil-slashes (the way teachers indicated their contempt for my style), I began to use semicolons as a type of protest march through my sentences.

Of course, at first I obeyed the arcane usage rules; I began to semicolonize only lists of things in the same sentence; it was perhaps mere juvenilia; but you have to start somewhere, eh? When I ran out of things to list, I began to use them before conjunctive adverbs like ‘therefore’, or ‘however’; and then even waving it at coordinating conjunctions like ‘but’; it was great fun; but I suspect my flouting must have been devilishly tiring to mark; and yet the red slashes continued; however they looked strained; I sensed victory was in sight.

Even I began to tire of them -as I am now- though; mistakes popped up here and there; you can’t win every battle by rushing into the fray; sometimes you need to regroup after a sally; sometimes you need to fool the opposition with a feigned retreat; pretend slip-ups.

Time for a little historical context I think. Even as a youth, I noticed out-of-place things -albethey small things. For example, I read that the first reported use for the semicolon was by the Italian printer and humanist Aldus Manutius the Elder in the 1490s.[i] I only found this out in in crusty old age, however, but by then, both habit and reputation did not require me to justify my proclivities anymore; I was, in the words of Shakespeare in his As You Like It, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything; okay I exaggerate; but anyway such luminaries (if you’re an American) as Abraham Lincoln; Martin Luther King (junior) -or to cross the sea again for another example, Virginia Woolf- were adamant acolytes of the semicolon industry; still, I wasn’t looking for supporters; I knew what I liked.

No great fan of Marcel Proust, nevertheless I took subconscious note of the number of words he could cram into a sentence with judicious interminable punctuation; but I have to admit to a mild disappointment with his larger obsession with commas; surely he could have achieved more of his 200 word sentences with all of their subordinate clauses; appositive phrases; not to mention parenthetical phrases on a greater, albeit equally bland, diet of semicolons without getting confused; (as I find myself now)…

Anyway, the mix-and-match aspect of semicolonolia, appealed to me from the start; using it was like getting an ice cream cone with more than one flavour on top. I mean think about it, eh? With one tap on a keyboard, you get a flavourful mixture of colon; comma; and period. Where else on the KWERTY do you get a bargain like that? It’s the closest thing to magic a beginning writer could ever get, I think; my teachers never saw it that way however.

“First you have to learn to drive,” they would repeat ad nauseum, as if they thought they were being so very innovative; “And only then” -(note the italics they would use in their misguided metaphorical attempts to ‘steer’ me clear of the semicolon curse) –“only then, should you be allowed to get behind the wheel of a sentence.”

On sober reflection, after all these years of driving, I can only suspect that they -the teachers, not their sentences- lived in fear of unbridled semicolomania. Fearing even more recalcitrance on my part, they were afraid that without their vigilance, I might do severe harm to those less diligent; those more forgiving; those mistaking kindness as being more effective in the long run than the strap; (a medieval punishment device in the schools of my youth). In fact I think they saw that I was making quite a few cumbersome semicolonic mistakes which those who -shudder the thought- might someday read my stuff less critically than it deserved; might sew and grow in their own infected essays long after they -the careful magisterial watchdogs- had died… Or am I supposed to say passed?

No, I’m afraid that the semicolon is already tattooed to my fingers by now; I don’t even notice what they type anymore; I simply turn them loose on an empty screen and watch the semicolons scatter like bits of gravel on a country road; for better or worse, I suppose.

As a probably unnecessary addendum, however, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out to any readers who have inadvertently waded this far into the waters of my essay -and lest anyone had doubted it- that you may find yourself alone and islanded; far from the mainland; and wishing you had at least had the good sense to have brought along something else with you to read; something with fewer semicolons; something, even, with fewer naked commas; something with more explanatory full-bodied, unbandaged colons over which you would be less likely to trip. It could at least have saved you the frequent referrals to Google AI to assess my semicolonarian mistakes.

I’m sorry about that; you could have read the title more closely; but then how would you ever know whether you yourself might become an involuntary casualty; might become a Johnny-semicolon-Appleseed kind of fomite yourself; …?

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/could-the-semicolon-die-out-a-recent-study-finds-a-marked-decline-in-its-usage-180986689

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