SBM Blog tries not to overindulge our personal fascination with certain topics that we think in our didactic moments should be important to all lawyers, like good writing, and related subtopics, like grammar and typography. That's why we did not alert you to this excellent New York Times piece, “Semicolons: A Love Story.” But we've recently noticed a growing and enthusiastic readership for posts on these topics, so Katie bar the door -- here, fresh off the blogpresses, is the New Yorker's "Semicolons; So Tricky." Our favorite excerpt:
I think the semicolon is more easily understood if it is defined in relation to the colon rather than to the comma. Under “Semicolon,” the book says, “Its main role is to indicate a separation between two parts of a sentence that is stronger than a comma but less strong than dividing the sentence in two with a full stop…. She looked at me; I was lost for words.”
So the semicolon is exactly what it looks like: a subtle hybrid of colon and comma. Actually, in ancient Greek, the same symbol was used to indicate a question.
And it still seems to have a vestigial interrogative quality to it, a cue to the reader that the writer is not finished yet; she is holding her breath. For example, if the sentence above—“She looked at me; I was lost for words”—occurred as dialogue in a piece that I was copy-editing, I would be tempted to poke in a period and make it into two sentences. In general, people—even people in love—do not speak in flights that demand semicolons. But in this instance I have to admit that without the semicolon something would be lost. With a period, the four words sink at the end: SHE LOOKED at me. The semicolon keeps the words above water: because of that semicolon, something about her look is going to be significant.
