Semicolons excite strong feelings among the sort of people who have strong feelings about semicolons. Perhaps you are one of them. On the first page of Semicolon, Cecelia Watson quotes Kurt Vonnegut on the subject: “Do not use semicolons … All they do is show you’ve been to college”. (She diplomatically omits his most pungent phrase: “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”.) In the other camp is Milan Kundera, who claimed: “I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods”.
There’s a touch of whimsy in both those quotations, and there’s a touch of whimsy in this brief, slippery, interesting little book. Not least in the subtitle, whose bold overclaim both mocks and courts the lucrative publishing cliché of tiny till-point books that promise to change your life. But it also hints that Watson’s aim goes beyond semicolons. She’s using the curving punctuation mark as a hook on which to hang a larger argument about language and usage – namely, to elaborate on the old argument that the “rules” of grammar should be a map of the territory rather than a set of train tracks; guidelines rather than commandments.
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