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Complex Numbers #964173 added August 14, 2019 at 12:17am
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Semicolonoscopy
Continuing yesterday's linguistic theme, today's link is about my personal favorite punctuation mark: the semicolon.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/01/the-birth-of-the-semicolon/
The Birth of the Semicolon
That sounds... painful.
The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly.
I imagine it would be hard to experiment with punctuation symbols these days; the computer keyboard and the extended ASCII set of characters are pretty well fixed. Dammit, there I go using a semicolon.
The modern equivalent would probably be some godawful new emoji.
I've seen other articles promoting ideas for new (or possibly resurrected) punctuation marks, such as the interrobang  (‽), which is what you get when an exclamation point (known in geekery as a "bang") fucks a question mark. No one uses the little bugger - it's rare that it's needed, and when it is it's much easier to type two characters than to look it up. I think it even has an ASCII representation; I don't know what it might be, because I just did a copy/paste to get it to show up there. Goddammit. Another semicolon.
Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. Jenson’s is a simple shooting star.
Waxing eloquent about the shape of punctuation marks? I guess everyone's a geek about something. Who the hell is Keith Haring, anyway? Can't be arsed to Google the name.
(For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”)
Yet another reason why postmodernists should never be taken seriously.
The rhetorical question mark, on the other hand, faltered and then fizzled out completely. This isn’t too surprising: does anyone really need a special punctuation mark to know when a question is rhetorical?
Oh ho! I see what you did there, asking a rhetorical question and ending the sentence with an actual question mark.
Still, a few cranky complainants notwithstanding, most humanists believed that each writer should work out his punctuation for himself, rather than employing a predetermined set of rules. A writer or an annotating reader was to exercise his own taste and judgment.
As if writers can be said to have those qualities. Also, that way lies anarchy.
Anyway, just a fun bit of punctuation history. I probably overuse semicolons, myself; some would say any use of one is overuse. (DAMMIT) They're technically unnecessary, because a semicolon separates two related, but independent, clauses, and you can do the same thing by simply starting a new sentence or using a conjunction.
Still, I'd hate for any key on my keyboard to wither away from disuse - even though that's the ultimate fate of any ~/` key for me. Hell, it nearly didn't work just then.
Semicolons are, to be sure, hard to get right, but they do adjust the flow of your writing. Without them. You sound. Like Shatner. Or Hemingway. |
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