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« more April Fool's Day | Main | Red Cross litmag » Saturday, March 31, 2007The stylish semicolonAs its authors have been explaining to everyone who would lend them a microphone, "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" is not a basketball book. It's a brackets miscellany, in which experts apply the March Madness method of winnowing to 101 cultural categories as varied as Economic Indicators, Paul Simon Songs, and Women's Undies. And, of all things, punctuation. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, staged the punctuation playoffs, arraying parentheses and tildes, capital letters and commas in competing pairs. Semicolon and space faced off in the final, and Sheidlower's final pick for punctuation champ was the space. That's an obvious enough call; none of us want to return to the days when monks economized on parchment by running words together. But how did the semicolon get so far? By beating the dollar sign and the pilcrow (the old-fashioned paragraph sign) and then, less understandably, the uppercase and the period. The semicolon more powerful than the period? Sounds like the decision of a semicolon sentimentalist. And Sheidlower's commentary doesn't dispel that suspicion: A tough battle indeed. While the period is objectively more important, in the end it has no soul. You master the period when you learn to write. The semicolon actually says something. What Nicholson Baker has called "that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology" is a relatively modern mark, yet skilled use of it is what separates the pedestrian from the elegant. I'd think a showdown between the period and space would have been even tougher. But that's the point, say "Bracketologist" authors Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir: It's not about who wins, it's about the pleasure of squaring off over square brackets, apostrophizing ampersands, and debating em dashes with your fellow punctuation nuts. And when you've had enough of that, you can move on to the Latin grammar shootout. (The smart money's on the ablative absolute.)
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:21 PM
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