As I’ve talked about before, I’m fascinated by commas and related matters, so this new video at the New Yorker website caught my eye: “The Semicolon; or, Mastering the Giant Comma.”
Definitely worth watching (Hey, you get to find out who invented the semicolon — imagine inventing a piece of punctuation that actually gets adopted by the language 🙂 ).
However, as I’ve also reported before, the idea of videos from the New Yorker seems sort of wrong. And I really like my language-related information to be in text form, so I can refer to it easily. And it turned out that Mary Norris, the “comma queen,” has written a book: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.
So I bought the book.
Wait, do you think that was the idea all along…
I went through a phase when I used semicolons all the time. Now they just irritate me. I’ve wanted to read Between You & Me for a long time… let us know how it is!
My mother found semicolons irritating, too. I think she thought they were pretentious.
I use them when appropriate, which was not always the case, but in a lot of situations I go for the two-short-sentences solution instead.
In writing dialogue, I’ve found that I only use semicolons for characters who would know what semicolons are and who would use them correctly when writing.
I’d never heard of her before, but this is an excellent explanation. I think I know what to use when discussing it with my 7th and 8th graders this year. 🙂
I think I first encountered her here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/holy-writ
This is more or less the beginning of the book, and discusses some aspects of the New Yorker house style, including the commas.
Other aspects are talked about here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_new_yorker#Style
And others include the fact that they are probably the only publication which would style the New York Times this way:
The New York Times.
I like that kind of thing.