Vive le point-virgule!

Last night I was at a party full of ornery conservatives. At some point the conversation turned to the French, which allowed us to take a break from discursive thought and indulge in the ritual France-baiting that is practically an American bodily function. We finished on an appropriately resounding note, with most everyone agreeing that all the intellectual and political disasters of modernity could be traced back to France. Damn frogs, etc.

I’m fine with mocking France, of course, but to every thing there is a season. There is a time to bash France and a time to praise her very real charms and excellences. And praise is certainly due to any nation civilized and literary enough to erupt into a passionate (and only half ironic) controversy over a punctuation mark.

It seems the semicolon ( le point-virgule ) is on the wane in France, thanks mostly to the creeping Anglo-Saxon barbarism of shorter sentences. This raises the question: “Is the semicolon worth preservation?” Defenders call it elegant and subtle while opponents call it useless and effeminate .

How do you, Gentle Reader, feel about the semicolon? For my part, I have always appreciated its power to force two potentially alienated sentences to acknowledge their mutual dependence without wholly sacrificing their individuality. But still, Kurt Vonnegut’s indictment of the semicolon has a certain power:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.