22-05-2025
World is moving on from the semicolon. That may be a good thing
By Bishan Samaddar
The semicolon, once the mark of poised prose, appears to be headed for the grammatical graveyard. Last week, The Guardian reported that a study commissioned by the language-learning software Babbel found that over the past two decades, English books have seen a precipitous decline in the use of the semicolon. It teeters on the verge of becoming the next Javan rhinoceros or Hawksbill sea turtle.
The semicolon, though, has had its moment in the sun. Many great writers of the 20th century embraced it and used it to craft perfect sentences. One may only look at the opening line of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (in Constance Garnett's English translation) — 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Or the one from V S Naipaul's A Bend in the River — 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.' There are many ways of stating profound truths, but the semicolon reveals their logic with elegance — a little flourish that coalesces the pleasure of refined thought. Neither the full stop nor a dash can replicate this nuance. The intellectual joy derived from a judiciously placed semicolon is irreplaceable.
But you and I are not great writers; nor are we in the 20th century. The correct use of the semicolon demands a grasp of grammar that fewer and fewer of us can boast of. Language is not adequately taught in our schools — punctuation least of all. Even those who study literature in colleges and universities dive deep into complex theories. The art of writing a clear, concise, comprehensible — and properly punctuated — sentence is not a priority. So only natural-born language geeks like me end up teaching ourselves the finer points of punctuation marks like semicolons and em dashes. When I discuss English grammar at the Seagull School of Publishing, I notice a clear gap among students: Some have barely an idea of how to handle the semicolon; others, especially those already working as editors, have learned its usage on their own.
In India, even established authors struggle with the use of something as basic as a comma. But since a comma is small and familiar, the everyday reader can overlook its wrong use. The semicolon, on the other hand, is a heavy-looking punctuation mark; it has a weightier presence. It jars if you use it incorrectly. I advise my students to avoid using the semicolon. Contemporary thought processes — expressed in WhatsApp messages, social media, and casual emails — probably do not need much poise. Dashes, ellipses or simple full stops can help arrange thoughts into lucid, powerful sentences. Such sentences may even appear less affected. While writers like Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf took the semicolon to great heights of sophistication, others like P G Wodehouse, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler barely used it. They still got their job done — and marvellously so.
Language, like everything around us, evolves continuously. Last year, as I began teaching the distinction between 'who' and 'whom' in one of my classes, a student asked, 'But isn't the word whom sort of extinct?' I was taken aback. In my protected editorial world, fortified by the armour of grammar, I'd never bothered to keep track of such a shift. For weeks afterwards, I keenly surveyed the columns of The New York Times, whose commitment to style and grammar I admire, and I was startled to find how many times the grammatical 'whom' had quietly given way to the colloquial 'who'. Words and punctuation marks outlive their utility just like we do in the world; their fond memory lingers among those who once cared for them.
Given the demands it makes on our already frazzled minds, it'll come as no surprise if the once-hallowed semicolon soon fades into redundancy. If we lose nuance and poise, perhaps we gain simplicity and clarity. Nuance may reward sensibility, but clarity builds sense. And these days, we all know we could use a bit more of the latter. I confess I'll wistfully mourn the semicolon if it were to become extinct. But there are more pressing extinctions on this earth to worry about.
Samaddar is an editor at Seagull Books, Kolkata
