Scan barcode
A review by lizshayne
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Okay, so, first of all, as a recovering pedant, this book CAME FOR ME. (Note, please, the incorrect but also right use of commas in the previous sentence.)
I loved it. Obviously I loved it; it's basically a book entitled "My special interest is a single punctuation mark". The stories are delightful and the shift from history to critical analysis to soapbox is beautifully managed.
Because, and here's the thing, Watson is not merely arguing that the semicolon is cool and does not deserve to be maligned, she's making a larger argument about the relationship between rules (or even laws) and the messy everyday world where the rules don't cover the case or are just plain wrong.
עת לעשות לה׳; הפרו את הסמיקולון.
You know, let's just quote it.
I loved it. Obviously I loved it; it's basically a book entitled "My special interest is a single punctuation mark". The stories are delightful and the shift from history to critical analysis to soapbox is beautifully managed.
Because, and here's the thing, Watson is not merely arguing that the semicolon is cool and does not deserve to be maligned, she's making a larger argument about the relationship between rules (or even laws) and the messy everyday world where the rules don't cover the case or are just plain wrong.
עת לעשות לה׳; הפרו את הסמיקולון.
You know, let's just quote it.
Even if you accept everything I’ve said in this book about rules, you might still feel, deep down, a love for the idea of grammar rules. But when it comes down to it, I’d wager that the object of your love lies elsewhere. That love is really for the English language, or for orderliness and organization, or for tradition. None of these things is a foolish thing to love. But if we really love English, or if we love the sense of structure that grammar provides, or if we love traditions and a sense of shared linguistic practices across generations, we have to look somewhere else to celebrate that devotion; rules will be, just as they always have been, inadequate to form a protective fence around English. We will never find the rules, unshiftable, unchangeable, and incorruptible. There are no such things.