Remarks in this column a couple of weeks ago about semi-colons, and The Times’s attitude to them (roughly summarised as “use sparingly”), met with approval from Roger Borthwick.
“I was pleased to read that the paper has the correct attitude. What intrigues me is how their misuse has spread so rapidly in the past ten years or so. How is it that bad habits spread so quickly? I worry that the proliferation of semi-colons is either engineered, or is being studied for future application for devious purposes.”
Heavens, what can he mean? I hope he won’t be disappointed by the convincing, if mundane, answer provided by Mary Walton of Eastbourne. “As an ex-teacher and tutor,” she writes, “I am aware that the government’s education gurus take a slightly different view from your style guide. Remember the brouhaha over the grammar paper in the KS2 SATs last year? Well, the preparation for that exam includes great focus on punctuation, including the ‘correct’ usage of colons and semi-colons. The advice is to use the latter far more liberally in connecting linked sentences. There are reams of exercises to this end and the test features questions where semi-colons need to be inserted. It’s a shame that the compilers of the tests and the powers directing them do not instead follow your paper’s eminently sensible approach. I fear we are heading back to the style of Charles Dickens, with semi-colons falling like confetti — decorative but of no real use.”
I had a look at some of the SATs tests and what also struck me about them was the generous endorsement of dashes. They’re all over the place and, once again, the style guide begs to differ from the education gurus. Dashes, it says, “should not be used in place of commas. Too many can be ugly and disruptive. They are a bad habit, often used to pursue a line of thought that the writer cannot be bothered to construct some other way.”
I remember reading about Colin MacInnes, author of Absolute Beginners, telling a sub-editor at New Society to remove the “flabby dashes” from his copy and put his colons back. Roy Peter Clark, teacher of writing and journalism at the Poynter Institute in Florida, wrote in a blog post at poynter.org that “The dash is the Kim Kardashian of punctuation marks: misplaced, over-exposed, shamelessly self-promoting, always eager to elbow out her jealous sisters the comma, colon, and semi-colon.”
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Even Clark, though, concedes that the dash does have two perfectly justifiable functions. The first is to allow the writer to embed a related thought into the run of a sentence and the second is to provide emphasis when you want to end a sentence with a “stab” — as Mary Walton does so eloquently in the last sentence of her email above.
Stage fright
Simon Esmonde Cleary wrote: “In Monday’s report on Isis retaking Palmyra you refer to its ‘amphitheatre’. The monument in question is a theatre, not an amphitheatre. The two are distinct in form and function. Just because ‘amphitheatre’ is a longer word does not make it more impressive if it is wrongly used.”
Fair cop. The style guide says “amphitheatres in a classical context are oval or circular (eg, the Colosseum in Rome); do not confuse with theatres, which are semi-circular or horseshoe-shaped”, and last year Professor Mary Beard wrote a rather testy post in her blog for the TLS, “after the nth report . . . discussing Isis atrocities in the ‘amphitheatre’ at Palmyra. I admit that I have not been there, but so far as I know Palmyra has no amphitheatre. What it does have is a rather splendid theatre.”
Or it did have. Does the correct term for an ancient building really matter in the face of all the horrors going on there? Mary believes it does. “If we, in the West, want to protect our cultural heritage in the face of the forces of darkness, then we might at least get the details of that cultural heritage right.”
Using “amphitheatre”, with its gory connotations of gladiatorial combat, is appealing in the context of Isis atrocities, but the analogy, she says, is a false one. One commenter on Mary’s blog, Ross McPherson, wrote: “The theatre’s perspective is very different from that of the amphitheatre. One is for citizens, the other is for a mob. In the theatre, the audience is addressed like an equal, in the amphitheatre, the audience is just an audience.”
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Possessive ladies
‘Why do you insist on omitting the possessive apostrophe from Ladies’ Open golf tournaments and Ladies’ European Tour?” asked Gordon Wilson, of Ockbrook, Derbyshire. “Ladies’ has to be possessive in these cases, otherwise it is just a plural. You wouldn’t say Men Open, you would say Men’s Open.”
Well no we wouldn’t because, of course, the men’s Open is just the Open. He’s right about the apostrophes, but what can we do? That’s how the Americans want to name their tournaments. We have the Women’s British Open, correctly punctuated. And at least we’re women. “Ladies” is gruesomely twee.
David Wilson from Chichester emailed about our report on a nativity play in which King Herod was beset by invading “hoards”.
“I declare a small personal interest. If you believe everything you read on the internet, I am the 69th generation in descent from King Herod.” I expect we all are, dear.