There is no mark of punctuation so upper-crust as the semicolon. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: “There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon.” I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
In my observation, the semicolon is used best by the British. I believe it’s a matter of education, and that a classical education will feature a lot of semicolons, perhaps because they are needed to translate Latin and Greek. Americans can do without the semicolon, just as they can give Marmite a pass, with major exceptions: William and Henry James, as internationalists, were brought up on semicolons; Walt Whitman was into really long, ecstatic series, and the simplest use of the semicolon is as a kind of extra-strength comma to link items that have commas in them. Classics in America date only from the eighteenth century, and much of our best stuff comes out of Mark Twain and is in the vernacular. We are a plainspoken, cheerfully vulgar people. Which is not to say that Mark Twain couldn’t or didn’t use semicolons—only that Huck Finn would find them fancy.
I have a friend who worked as a copy editor in Canada, and whose education in Nova Scotia was more British than American. She is very fond of the semicolon, and uses it instead of a comma in the greeting of a letter, thus:
Dear Mary;
She swears that this is proper usage, that it was what she was taught and not her own innovation. She likes to think of the semicolon as a comma with vibrato. (She plays the viola.) I have never liked vibrato. I like a clear sound, without a lot of throb in it. Give me a comma or a period, period. Once in a while, when it is called for, a colon.
What is a semicolon, anyway? Is it half a colon? Is it a period balanced on top of a comma? The Italian for “semicolon” is punto e virgola (“period and comma”). Or an apostrophe that has been knocked down and pinned by a period? In Greek, both ancient and modern, what looks like a semicolon actually functions as a question mark. If you turn a semicolon upside down and hold it up to a mirror, it slightly resembles a question mark. I’ll say this: as a copy editor, I find it the most pleasing mark to make. You have your caret, the upside-down v (^) indicating that you want to insert something on the baseline, with a raised dot and a tail centered vertically beneath it.
In technical terms, the semicolon links independent clauses. This is wrong:
“It ends a clause; and it links a clause to the clause before.”
This is right:
“It ends a clause; it links a clause to the clause before.”
This is also right:
“It ends a clause, and it links a clause to the clause before.”
The semicolon can be done without. You can substitute a comma and a conjunction. But our system of punctuation is highly economical, and if the semicolon has survived all this time there must be some reason for it.
The thing about the semicolon is that, unless it is being used in the Whitmanesque sense, what follows it must be able to function as its own sentence—an independent clause. The semicolon creates a hook on which to dangle something off the first part of the sentence. It irritates me when someone uses the semicolon to join things that really have no relation to each other; it is a bald maneuver to make you keep reading. I see the semicolon a lot more than I used to, either because I’m reading more British writers or because American writers have British editors or because American writers are competing with British writers to show that they, too, are sophisticated. Used well, the semicolon makes a powerful impression; misused, it betrays your ignorance.
You can open a volume of Henry James at random and find numerous well-tempered semicolons. I picked up The Henry James Reader, edited by Leon Edel. This is from The Aspern Papers:
“You must wait—you must wait,” Miss Tina mournfully moralised; and her tone ministered little to my patience, for it seemed after all to accept that wretched possibility. I would teach myself to wait, I declared nevertheless; because in the first place I couldn’t do otherwise and in the second I had her promise, given me the other night, that she would help me.
“Of course if the papers are gone that’s no use,” she said; not as if she wished to recede, but only to be conscientious.
“Naturally. But if you could only find out!” I groaned, quivering again.
These semicolons don’t exactly follow modern conventions, and the ones that are combined with conjunctions could be replaced with commas, but something would be lost. James’s semicolons are like Melville’s commas, raised to a higher degree: the pauses seem to indicate facial expressions—raised eyebrows, pursed lips, a puckered brow. They heighten the prose.
In James, the semicolon is often followed by a conjunction that shouldn’t be necessary. From Washington Square:
She was bad; but she couldn’t help it.