Semicolons are for Girls?

By Julia Newman

I was surfing the internet and I came across an article from The Boston Globe titled, “Sex and the semicolon: The punctuation mark that makes men tremble”, written by Jan Freeman. It seems as though this idea of the semicolon bearing feminine qualities comes from the fact that many writers, flat out, do not like the semicolon and are looking for ways to devalue it. Since there are writers out there who are so against the semicolon’s use, this claim that they are “girly” appears to be a tactic of theirs to further dismantle its usage.

The first thing I thought was that I am a girl; I have been told in the past that I tend to overuse the semicolon, but I never thought it had any sort of correlation with my gender. One way of looking at this argument, from the point of view of those macho semicolon haters, is that the semicolon is more feminine in that it produces a lengthier and more thought-out sentence. Alternatively, another piece of punctuation, such as the masculine em dash or blunt period, is more “manly” because they get to the point more directly. These ways of thinking are evocative of the stereotypical ways that men and women deal with certain things. I couldn’t help but think of the way in which men and women stereotypically deal with arguments when they are in a relationship. The man usually tries to avoid communication with short, blunt sentences, suggestive of the period, whereas the woman is always trying to express her feelings and keeps talking, suggestive of the semi-colon. Perhaps those semicolon haters are actually just insecure. Maybe they don’t know how to correctly use the semicolon and they feel they have to bash it by saying that it is girly and useless.

The semicolon is not useless, and in fact the article from The Boston Globe mentions some very famous MALE writers who are quite fond of the semicolon. One of these was Herman Melville, who used close to four semicolons per one-thousand letters in Moby-Dick. Granted he is a writer from the past, his literature has withstood the test of time, so why shouldn’t the semicolon? Another male writer, appreciative of what the semicolon can add to a piece, is John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules. Clearly it is not only women writers who are using the semicolon, so does that mean that those individuals who have dubbed the semicolon a feminine piece of punctuation would call Melville and Irving girly?

One of the most interesting and ludicrous descriptions of the semicolon described in this article came from Kurt Vonnegot, an American novelist, who called these punctuation mark, “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." I understand the transvestite and hermaphroditic references to be saying that the semicolon is somewhere between a comma and period, which that part, I will agree with. However, they do not represent absolutely nothing. I would, more or less, agree that they are somewhere in between a comma and a period, but that does render them completely and utterly ineffective. They are, rather, an indispensable piece of punctuation that can allow for a reader to briefly pause in between two closely related thoughts, without having to completely stop with a blunt and masculine period.

When I was reading this article, I could not help but think about the poem “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound. Semicolons can be crucial punctuation marks in creative writing and this is demonstrated clearly in Pound’s poem. The entire poem is two lines long,

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The semicolon in this poem has been a hot topic for debate because people wonder whether the semicolon is making the last line secondary to the one before it or if the semicolon is simply connecting two equal ideas. Regardless of what Pound’s intentions were in using the semicolon, I think it is more important that because the semicolon is placed there that the relationship between the two lines is now left open for interpretation. Had there been another punctuation mark, then perhaps the relationship would be less ambiguous and much less interesting. I wonder if Kurt Vonnegot would call this poem useless.

The claim that semicolons are girly and bear no real function in writing is absolutely absurd. I don’t think that semicolons are manly punctuation marks either or that they are the best punctuation marks. I believe one’s decision to use, or not to use, the semicolon is simply a reflection of an individual’s writing style. If the semicolon can be the basis for such an interesting debate and the period and comma get off the hook and are just accepted, it clearly shows that the semicolon is a valued part of writing and is most definitely not “absolutely useless”.