Re: Flexibility of English

Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
In article <1148557334.872401.248320@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Nicholas Waller <testo888@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.

Really? I couldn't live without them in fiction. Word's default
font makes them look too much like commas, and I keep revising my
work, tripping over "that should be a semicolon" and then squinting
and finding that it *is* a semicolon. (Memo to self: change font!)
I'm sure I use more semicolons in my fiction than in my academic
writing.

Well, I was thinking aloud really, wondering if and in what way there
was truth in what Vonnegut claimed; certainly a profusion of
semi-colons seems old-fashioned, perhaps Victorian; as if one was
trying too hard to carry on in long sentences: "It was a dark and
stormy night; the rain fell in torrents" and so on; and perhaps there
can be a tendency to drop them in too often; like just then; but I
might be wrong; and finally, it's possible semi-colons are still
reasonably transparent for people of a certain age (I'm 48) but perhaps
they trip up younger and hipper types, to whom they might appear prissy
and obfuscatory. Still, capital letters and fully spelt out words might
trip them up too.

As I say, I quite like them and I use them myself; in my short story,
Enta Geweorc, twice in two sentences:

"Impelled dust streamed outwards, billowing; a gentle touch and the
gins whined down to nothing.
"So he was here; his first time home in years."

In another place I use a colon and two semi-colons in the same sentence
[1].

The one thing I allow myself in nonfiction but almost never in fiction
is parentheses; I use pairs of dashes instead.

How would you repunctuate these? (First four semicolons in the WIP.)

**
"This is a Tervola of honor, a rare creature indeed; if he gives his
word he will keep it."

(That could, I think, be a period or a colon instead, with a slight
change of emphasis.)

It is quite a formal, even old-fashioned sentence anyway (a rare
creature indeed) and a semi-colon seems fine; otherwise a full stop. I
don't know the context. The semi-colon makes it appear spoken by
someone conscious of his audience, perhaps speaking oleaginously in
front of the king and his Arslikhans (and possibly lying). A full stop
would sound terser to me, as if spoken by an impatient general in a
battle-meeting dismissing a dubious lieutenant's fretting. If he gives
his word he'll keep it. Now bugger off.

If I was really rejecting semi-colons to make the text appear more
modern I'd probably reject most colons as well.

**
"And I decided I didn't care to throw any more lives away; especially
my own."

This changes meaning with a comma; less emphasis on the last phrase.
It could be a period, with *more* emphasis. The semicolon fits
nicely in between. If I had to change it, probably a long dash, but
that has more "afterthought" quality.

I'd probably pick a comma rather than a semi-colon; especially if it
was for a vaguely historical setting. A dash if it was a futuristic
cyberdude in shades talking, though in that case I suppose it would be
more "I di wanner throw any more lives away - speshal mine".

**
Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
proprietries.

This could be a period--I don't think it could be a colon--or a
dash, but both change the flavor slightly.

I'd probably go for the full stop for preference.

**
In half an hour he had a loose robe of black silk, long in
the sleeves but comfortable; a basin of herb-scented water and half
a dozen towels; ink, quill and parchment; and pale rosy wine and
a platter of bread and cheese, far more than he needed.

Those cannot be commas because of the internal commas in each
phrase, so they would have to be periods and fragments, or else
the whole thing would have to be recast somehow.

Given that and its archaic flavour (quill, parchment and platter)
semi-colons fit best, though recasting might be better if the section
was about some teen killer putting on her body armour and grabbing some
sustubes and a palmer.

Punctuation is surprisingly powerful given how few signs are involved
and how fixed the meaning of most of them is!

[1]
"Collard drifted the Alfred across the just-familiar landmarks of
smashed, flooded Cheddar. Impulse cells ripped the sea into boiling
foam as he looked down on the inundated ruins of houses and several
pubs, the Bath Street banks and shops, the Kings of Wessex school, the
heliport, the swimming pool and ice rink; and before them, the church
and 14th century market cross, the Saxon royal palaces and the Roman
villa, the Neolithic workings; all wrecked, abandoned and submerged,
all gone, all now shells, or craters, memories of post-holes and graves
and heaps of rubble, shattered and drowned and broken apart...

...How unearthlike it will be
When the world's wealth lies waste -
Wind-blasted walls, rime-crusted ruins."

This last a quote from an Old English poem.

In the same story (which mixed spaceships, a post-apocalyptic
Cheddar[2] and quotations from Anglo-Saxon poems on the post-Roman
English landscape) I quoted this from a Victorian translation of the
Ango-Saxon chronicle, which has a spattering of semis, including a semi
followed by a dash:

""This year about mid-winter, after twelfth-night, the Danish army
stole out of Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West-Saxons;
where they settled, and drove many of the people over sea; and of the
rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will; - all
but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods
and fastnesses of the moors..."

[2] The town, not the cheese.

--
Nick
nawaller [dot] com/stories/enta_geweorc.htm

.

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