“Delightful.”– Mary Norris, The New Yorker A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell dislike it.
Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit like it. Why? When is it reliable? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the fluctuate of this notorious punctuation mark, which for several years was the trendiest one on the planet of letters.
In the 19th century, as grammar books ended up being all the rage, the guidelines of how we utilize language ended up being both more stringent and more complicated, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a variety of examples– from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.
‘s”Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep– Watson exposes how standard grammar guidelines make us less effective at interacting with each other than we ‘d believe. Even the most die-hard grammar enthusiasts would be much better served by tossing the guideline books and discovering a much better method to engage with language.
Through her rollicking bio of the semicolon, Watson composes a guide to grammar that discusses why we do not require guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the inmost, most main worth of language: real interaction.
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