It’s well known that grammar stoushes can get a tad heated.
A very curious article in the Boston Globe reflecting on punctuation wars surrounding the semicolon, with the tag line “the punctuation mark that makes men tremble”, shows something rather interesting about language in use aside from its ostensible casus belli: how quickly heated arguments lead to the invocation of gendered abuse.
Consider this:
Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.
And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”
Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing “a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.”
You’d think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. If semicolons are masculine enough for Melville and Irving, why should they unsettle Barthelme and Vonnegut? Are today’s male writers just more insecure than yesterday’s about the manliness of their vocation?
I’d rather have semi-colons than comma splices.
I don’t understand; I thought everyone knew that the semi-colon is a bad-ass mutha that kicks ass and takes names. When I imagine the semi-colon, I imagine it playing awesome guitar in the best band in the world; rocking out with c*ck out, if necessary.
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ohmigod, they’re breeding like Fibonacci’s rabbits!
Maybe it’s the ’semi-’ part; it reads like a job half-done. If you need a colon, why not go the whole hog? A typical bloke’s attitude.
Sentence fragment. Apologies.
nah, FDB: it’s the namby-pamby “have I finished this sentence? ummm maybe I haven’t? not really sure, so let’s have a bet both ways….” sissies! girly girls!!
Real me don’t eat quiche. Let’s ask Ute Man what he thinks of colons ‘n shit.
Americans are so weird.
The semi-colon is easily my favourite punctuation mark. And I don’t feel like a girl for saying so (whatever it would even mean to feel emasculated by the use of a punctuation mark).
Clearly it is manly to speak only in short, direct sentences, with no subordinate clauses or any fancy shit like that.
Real men don’t elaborate.
The low status of (or even hatred for) things perceived to be female is fascinating in the light of the fact that most of the MSM and the commenters thereon who would tell you that feminism is So Ovah and women have now achieved perfect equality, and of course anything further would be Going Too Far.
I sometimes wonder whether ninety percent of the population goes around with its eyes shut and its fingers in its collective ear going “lalalala”. A form of punctuation, girly? Sweet dead Nazarene on a stick.
“… colons ‘n shit.”
Is it unmanly to giggle?
But what about the *real* controversies in punctuation? Virgule v Solidus? Prime v Apostrophe (v quote marks, curly and straight)? and of course, the Big One: Hyphen v Dash, which played a significant role in the breakup of Czech and Slovak, back in the day.
I’m a spaced en dash man myself. I’m sure I use it mostly to butcher grammar but it looks nice.
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Darryl, what you want is a pair of em dashes, used to separate an independent clause within a statement.
As long as you’re not using the ellipsis, which is an abomination.
Consider the chickenhawk, grasshopper (and Helen). The more gentle, bourgouis, office-bound and physically risk-free his life has been, the more likely he is to side with whatever option seems more macho.
The fewer traditionally manly things a dude has been called upon to do, the more likely he is to set up false masculinity tests that he can pass.
What are people’s “views” on the employment of “scare quotes” in social science? my own “impression”, formed over several “years”, is that its an evasive “tool” commonly employed to “avoid” saying anything “concrete” or “committal” about the “topic” you allegedly “know something” about.
“Agreed”.
For a “good” “laugh,” check out The “Blog” of Unnecessary Quotation “Marks”.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The free exclamation marks are on me!
“what you want is a pair of em dashes, used to separate an independent clause within a statement.”
No, no, no. Unless you’re forcibly chained to a ‘house style’ (like the silly old Chicago Manual, spaced ens are the way to go. Robert Bringhurst says em dashes “belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography”. I don’t mind an ellipse to mark aposiopesis, but built-in ellipses (option–semicolon) are almost always rubbish and three periods are just cheap and dirty.
But the fact remains I wouldn’t recognise an independant clause if I fell over it. I’m just terrible at that sort of thing. I can’t even reliably pick out the finite verb in a simple sentence. (speaking of which, is it the subject or the object that goes before the verb in a simple sentence?)
d
d
Subject.
Anyway, I’m a massive abuser of the spaced en - it rocks!!! Microsoft Word makes it into a spaced em automatically though.
Well, semicolons were thought of as signalling a rational & thus manly prose style in the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century, by English publishers anyway. And they would put them in wherever the writing was betraying too much girly enthusiasm by way of excessive dashing and insufficiently classically balanced clauses.
Ambigulous Aug 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Y’see, I would’ve used a semicolon rather than a colon there…
You seem a little insecure about your sexuality Youie; either a comma or an en-dash could replace that colon.
I’m picking up what you’re putting down, to quote the young folks these days.
To which the only possible response is:
As lspace.org says, this is “Something that Terry feels strongly about, because a similar quote also appears in Reaper Man“.
So there.
We programmers find the semi colon to be indispensable as in:
long now = new Date().getTime();
UserDetails details = usrMgrOID.getUser(eNumber);
long then = new Date().getTime();
if you see what I mean.
Actually, that’s one of the rare cases where either would be appropriate.
I think that you are all gay. Real men randomly bold statements in their sentences, even occasionally doing so where the emphasis is wrong. This is how Supermen and Supervillains have talked since the sixties in Marvel Comics. It’s like an Iambic Pentameter of tough; though of course, real men know nothing of poetry.
sg — You’ve left out the other great mainstay of discourse in Marvel comics, which is the thought (or speech) balloon stating the visually obvious. Like when Spiderman has been pushed off a rooftop, and he thinks to himself, “Ungh… falling…” “If can only… shoot web… at that flagpole…” Of course, this has got nothing on the amazing dash-dash-dash sightlines in Nancy. “Sluggo! [dash-dash-dash] Am I looking at your new hat?!” “Yes, Nancy, you are, as the sightlines running directly from your eyes to my hat seem to imply.”
For sheer entertainment value, I’d also point out the marvelous passage in “Flowers for Algernon” where the narrator writes, “Today, I learned, the comma, it is, hard, to know, when to use, the comma,…”
and, j_p_z, if you buy the computer game “Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich”, you get to do and experience all of this first hand. It is highly entertaining.
Patrick B, I think you are using a girly programming language. Real men program with curly brackets.
sg @ #25 — that was hilarious!!!!
Then I can only recommend you play the computer game - every scene is a pastiche of comic cliches!