Crockham Hill Jul/Aug 2025 Newsletter - Flipbook - Page 43
Last Word
The Times reported the following sad fact in a recent third
leader, entitled 8Colonic Irrigation9
Orwell thought it unnecessary and excluded it from Coming Up for Air;
Hemingway hated it and believed it should be banished from the Qwerty
keyboard. Cormac McCarthy consumed 42 in his first book and then went
on a diet for his next nine novels, using only one. Kurt Vonnegut abhorred
the thing. Its only purpose, he said, was to show that you9d been to college.
The semicolon divides opinion as successfully as it divides sentences. Too
clever by half, say some; a beautiful device in the right hands, say others.
Hard figures suggest that the detractors have the upper hand: a new study
suggests most British students barely use it.
Research by Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar
Workbook, found that 67 per cent of British students rarely or never
employ a semicolon; only 11 percent are frequent users. In books written
in English in 2000, it appeared once in every 205 words; today it is down to
one in every 390. The finding mirrors a study by Lancaster University
suggesting that semicolon use has plummeted by a quarter in the last 30
years. One reason could be a growth in the use of bald staccato in texting
and social media. A faster world has less time for reflective conjoining of
ideas in a single sentence. The list is the semicolon9s last redoubt.
This decline in use is to be regretted. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens
swore by it and the results were not too shabby. The semicolon9s inventor,
the renaissance printer Aldus Pius Minutius, intended it to prolong a pause.
Now, that function is being increasingly discharged by the fierce and
unsightly dash. As speech becomes rougher and more assertive, so the
written word follows 3 though not for everyone. While the full stop is the
load-bearer without which meaning collapses, the semicolon is its essential
but pleasing companion, able to supply rhythm and discord. As Abraham
Lincoln said of it:
