An absorbing article in a US journalism magazine recently spoke of the glories of reporters who walk around with their eyes open, noticing things that are interesting, and have some capacity not only to shape a story around these, but to make them a great topic of conversation. An example: a chap who noticed a semicolon in a traffic sign; thinking that remarkable he wrote a lengthy lyric about this punctuation mark and asked whether it will much longer survive. As one might expect, this excited a furious correspondence, for and against the semicolon; it may even be concluded, down the track, that the journalist hastened its demise, if only by providing an occasion for various mavens to denounce it.
The particular journalist was not the first to draw attention to its poor health. Trevor Butterworth, in the Financial Times, wrote a lovely defence of the semicolon three years ago (www.trevorbutterworth.com/pause- celebre.htm) but made, I think, the mistake of accusing US journalists and editors of hating it, and trying to ban it. Put on the defensive, many went not into denial but sought to find words to justify their supposed aversion.
One brilliant editor, known himself for an occasional semicolon, justified a ban on the basis that if abuse was going to be common, it was simpler and safer to have a flat-out ban.
''It's like drug regulation,'' Michael Kinsey told Butterworth. ''Drugs are banned sometimes because a minority of users will have negative side effects, or because taking them correctly is complicated though many people could get it right and would find them helpful. Actually I'm opposed to that kind of thinking re drugs, but I am OK with it re punctuation. Punctuation can't save your life''.
So how did Kinsey think the semicolon was being misused?. ''The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is.''
Actually, I suspect that the worse sin of the semicolon in the eye of many editors is in its tendency to make a sentence long, and perhaps complicated. Never mind that it might contain at least two (implicitly related) thoughts; for some, the complexity of a sentence is to be judged primarily by its length, which is defined as the period between full stops. Short writing is simpler.
Which is fine in certain circumstances. But sometimes complexity, subtlety, or the admission of nuance and tension are useful too. A semicolon does not necessarily make a set of statements more difficult to understand. Butterworth illustrated this, inter alia, by quoting the opening lines from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited:
'''I have been here before,' I said. I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than 20 years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool's parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour such as our climate affords once or twice a year; when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.''
As Butterworth comments: ''strike out those semicolons, administer an unyielding regimen of commas and full stops, and the scene is more manic than wistful; instead of reverie, poor Charles Ryder has a case of the jitters.''
I think Michael Kinsey quite wrong, incidentally, to suggest that punctuation cannot save your life. Had the English Parliament used punctuation of any kind in its legislation of 1351 (in the time of Edward III) it is possible that Roger Casement would not have been hanged in 1916. The Act said that whoever ''levied war against the King in his Realm or adhered to the King's enemies in his Realm giving them aid and comfort in his Realm or elsewhere'' was guilty of treason. Casement's allegedly treasonous acts were not in the realm, but in Germany. Casement's lawyers argued that ''or elsewhere'' governed only the words ''aid and comfort in the realm'' and did not refer or apply to the words ''be adherent to the King's enemies in his realm''. Alas, the British courts inferred a host of commas in their reading of the Act, leading to the accusation that Casement was ''hanged by a comma''. (Incidentally, it is said that after the British repented of this, having decided that Casement was an Irish patriot instead, disinterred his body and repatriated it to Dublin, they accidentally dug up and sent the body of the poisoner, Dr George Crippen, instead.)
Usually, a comma will not easily substitute for a fresh clause or sentence that might follow another after a semicolon. A comma is a tiny pause, shorter than the pause after a full stop. A semicolon is about halfway in between, and, as Kinsey suggests, should be used (in that context anyway) only when the idea of the second sentence is closely linked to that of the first. It's also useful with long lists, to give the writer or speaker a break. It lets you break the list up into sets, or and to avoid ambiguity when commas are not quite up to the job. The semicolon can link independent clauses which are closely connected either by sequence or subject matter, where no conjunction is used: ''The shearing shed cut out at 2pm; the pubs in the nearest town were full by 3pm; by 9pm 12 men were sleeping it off in the police station cells.''