REAL AMERICANS DON'T DO NUANCE

Pause Celebre (Trevor Butterworth, 17 September 2005, Financial Times)

"You're kidding," said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation's axis of evil. Or at least many of them do. "But I like semicolons," she protested, "they allow a writer to go further." Trevor McGuinness, a business manager, was equally incredulous. "Hazlitt," he said, smacking the table indignantly, "look at Hazlitt!" Had midnight been closer and the bottle emptier, we might have taken him literally; but the point still floated within the grasp of sober minds: if so great a prose stylist as William Hazlitt had embraced the semicolon, then surely we could too?...

Big deal or not, there is really only one use of the semicolon that is "more or less mandated", says Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of About Town, a monumental account of The New Yorker magazine (whose history is marked by fractious debates over the placement of commas). And that is to separate series elements containing commas (for example, "The cities represented were Albany, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; and Selma, Alabama). The other principal uses, says Yagoda, are discretionary: "That is I might, with total grammatical correctness and without changing my meaning in the slightest, choose any one of the following: 1. 'The book under review is utter hogwash; and that is why it is worth examining.' 2. 'The book under review is utter hogwash, and that is why it is worth examining.' 3. 'The book under review is utter hogwash; that is why it is worth examining.' 4. 'The book under review is utter hogwash. That is why it is worth examining.'" Deciding which of the four to choose is strictly a matter of sound and rhythm, says Yagoda - that is to say, personal style. "Writers who like (consciously or unconsciously) to stop and pause, and/or who are under the influence of Hemingway, choose 4. Those who like balanced rhythms might choose 3. Those aiming for a 'transparent' style might choose 2. And those who are a little bit enamoured with the sound of their own voice might choose 1."...

Style, as F.L. Lucas observed through pages larded with semicolons, "is a means by which a human being gains contact with others; it is personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech." And surely there is something brutish in being assaulted by wave after wave of fact through prose that has the unyielding rhythm and cadence of a machine gun. That, in the end, is what rattled everyone in Termon House on New Year's Eve: the storm rolling in from the west was figurative; the hyperpower at the gate was full of passionate intensity, and it did not do nuance.