RDH - The Semicolon, No Longer a Shibboleth, Is Easier Than Ever to Use

The Semicolon, No Longer a Shibboleth, Is Easier Than Ever to Use

February 28, 2007

As I type these words, most English-speaking people use a standard QWERTY keyboard whenever they write anything longer than a line or two. So do I. I know that all keyboards can be modified and that it would be easy enough to switch to something more efficient—e.g., if I can simply toggle my more sophisticated brother's standard AZERTY French keyboard to English whenever I need to borrow it, I could certainly make the switch to Dvorak in a matter of seconds and be done with it—but years working for other people in large offices made it seem somehow more efficient to use what everyone else was using. Besides, the standard English-language QWERTY keyboard happens to boast at least one significant advantage over most other configurations: the semicolon sits right there on the home row, for all the world as if it were every bit as important as an a or an s or a d. And, far from being the only interesting thing about the otherwise lackluster QWERTY key configuration, this one little fact happens to cater perfectly to our culture's simultaneous craving for status and convenience.

Semicolons, for those of you who care, are properly used in modern standard English as a substitute for periods or, more rarely, commas. Substitution for the comma used to be more common; nowadays, academics are practically the only people who do this—almost always to separate a relatively complex series of clauses that themselves contain commas. This organizational use of the semicolon-as-comma—helping to establish a sort of hierarchy among clauses in a single sentence—is, more or less, the last remaining acceptable instance in which a semicolon can stand in for a comma.* All other such instances have been effectively replaced by the all-purpose em dash—once used sparingly, now beloved of all but the most conservative among us.†

But think of it: if a semicolon can stand in for a period, then whenever you type a period to end a sentence, you have the option, at least in theory, of using a semicolon instead. I know, it's redundant to put it that way, but the redundancy in this case is important because the implications are so enormous. If you type a semicolon rather than a period, you are gaining two advantages: (1) instead of being obliged to move your right hand's least-independent finger—the corollary to the ring finger—down off home row to strike the period, you can simply twitch the muscles that activate your pinkie and instantaneously produce a semicolon, and (2) you are letting yourself off the hook as far as capitalizing the first letter of your next thought is concerned.

So, to put it another way, all you have to do to connect two independent thoughts on the English-language QWERTY keyboard—if you are lucky enough to have a right hand and a pinkie—is to apply the slightest pressure to the semicolon key, hit the space bar, and begin the next string of words without shifting, pausing, or thinking. This is the magic of the semicolon.

But it gets better. Not only is the semicolon far more convenient to use than the period, it also happens to enjoy the reputation of being more sophisticated, especially when used correctly. It's not often in life that the fancier way of doing something also happens to be easier to implement. And there's no question that smart people everywhere have caught on, leaving me to marvel at how sometimes the most trivial circumstances can come together to make something extraordinary happen.

Convenient to use and impressive when used correctly, semicolons are the perfect tool for those of us who want to add style and sophistication to our busy lives without having to work too hard for it.

*Such a sentence would look like the one that you are reading right now, which is a very bad sentence that will introduce a completely irrelevant list: this list, first of all, will display the sort of lack of imagination that is the fruit of too much labor; second, it gives me the opportunity to type more words today than I otherwise might, thereby accelerating the growth of my fingernails (including, in this particular case, the nail on my right-hand pinkie finger, whose stimulation is enhanced by extra semicolons, as long as these semicolons are not, by replacing a period before a left-handed capital letter, preventing the more vigorous activity of striking the Shift key); and, finally, I will have demonstrated my point, as entirely boring as it might be (because, after all, what's interesting about a sentence is what it has to say, not how it is punctuated).

†To illustrate this point, today we would invariably use an em dash (if not a plain-old comma) instead of the semicolon in the following sentence from The Golden Bowl (1904):

"When I speak worse, you see, I speak French," he had said; intimating thus that there were discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that language was the most apt.