Pause celebre

I am, as you are probably aware, a fan of the semicolon; it is a useful tool in the writer's toolbox. The FT has a beautiful article in its defence:

Now, one may dispute the merits of Brideshead Revisited until the last classical facade crumbles and falls, but it would be capricious to deny Waugh's prose its allure. And this is the point, whether by sensuous cadence slow or karmically balanced meter, semicolons are weapons of mass seduction. Of course, they can be deployed meretriciously, but eye the well-thumbed passages of great British writing anew and you'll see them lolling around like mischievous putti, nudging us into nuance, winking ironically, taking us further — further than we might have ever thought we wanted to go.

(You will notice that I'm also a big fan of the em dash!)

This is the kind of writing I would like to produce — hopefully do produce, on occasion! — languid and seductive. I'm sure I fall short, but the idea still inspires me.

“If I were linguistic emperor,” says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, “not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we'd all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I'm on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”

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.”

Go and read it.

(Please note that, in light of my recent writing of 4 posts a day, I have bumped the articles-per-page count to 8.)

Posted at 2005-09-17 17:38:10 by Richard • Link to Pause celebre
Comments, trackbacks.