Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
February 18, 2008
Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
By SAM ROBERTS
Correction Appended

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard
exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they
get off the train.

"Please put it in a trash can," riders are reminded. After which Neil
Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency's marketing and
service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the
sentence reads, "that's good news for everyone."

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in
exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature
and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been
largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style
books advise, that distinct division between statements that are
closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a
conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his
life," Kurt Vonnegut once said. "Old age is more like a semicolon."

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers
rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at
Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic
light of a "New York sentence." In response, most New Yorkers
accelerate; they don't pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the
New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr.
Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager,
learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn
College, where he majored in English and later received a master's
degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one's personal feelings about semicolons, some people
don't use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter
was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was
concerned.

"I thought at first somebody was complaining," he said.

One of the school system's most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz,
the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with
rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote,
the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just
as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an
even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of
imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a
court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group's challenge to a
statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were
separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper
conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at
The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster's use of the semicolon to
be "impeccable."

Lynne Truss, author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation," called it a "lovely example" of proper
punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of
California, Berkeley, praised the "burgeoning of punctuational
literacy in unlikely places."

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before
retiring, opined, "The semicolon is correct, though I'd have used a
colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that
sentence."

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, "I suppose Bush would claim it's
the effect of No Child Left Behind."

New York City Transit's unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail
messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of
semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic
emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2008

An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit
employee's deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was
less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss,
who called the placard a "lovely example" of proper punctuation. The
title of the book is "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" — not "Eats Shoots &
Leaves." (The subtitle of Ms. Truss's book is "The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation.")

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregion/18semicolon.html