LE point-virgule. Say it with a husky voice, drawing seductively on a Gauloise; say it sipping pastis at a pavement café on the Rive Gauche. Le point-virgule say it with passion.
Bored with Carla Bruni, the custodians of French propriety are getting their knickers in a twist over the semicolon.
Apparently, this poor punctuation mark is doomed across the Channel. Now writers and linguists have mounted a campaign to save it from extinction because the media and the French people no longer understand its usage. You won't be surprised to hear that inelegant English - with its propensity for short sentences - is to blame. Sacrebleu! (Can I be so bold as to use an exclamation mark?) Claude Duneton, a writer and French teacher, explained: "To make long sentences, you need a nice fountain pen and a good piece of paper. Short sentences come from the more direct, Anglo-Saxon style. That reflects the modern age and the need for speed."
Sylvie Prioul, who has co-written a book on the art of punctuation, said on France-Inter radio: "The semicolon is disappearing like the bear. People do not like it; writers are frightened of it; newspapers no longer use it. It's a bit sad." She went on to say - after a brief, semi-colonic pause, that the "horrible" practices of English typesetting, as used by computers, were destroying the punctuation mark cherished by Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust and other great writers.
I sympathise with Ms Prioul, Victor, Marcel et al. I'm fond of punctuation and, sadly, can get quite exercised over the use of linguistic tools. I get excited - I try to keep this in check - over parenthesis. Misuse of apostrophe's can make me agitated. Are those three dots ellipsis ... or aposiopesis? And why has zeugma been left forgotten in tatters to be forgotten?
But I shed my language anorak a long time ago and learned to live a little. Much as I recognise the importance of preserving the rules of syntax, grammar and punctuation, the fact that language lives, breathes and evolves cannot be ignored.
It's deplorable that the majority of children leave school unable to use a comma, recognise a clause or distinguish between an adverb and an adjective. But it's hardly surprising since they are being taught by a generation of teachers who weren't taught this themselves. Punctuation was once taught as a staple in schools in the same way as times tables. Sadly, this went out of fashion in favour of the power of expression. What was lost on the radicals of the 1970s is the power of expression that can be evoked by the deft deployment of a comma.
The French campaigners have a point (full and otherwise). But even their late, great writers and thinkers would have, I'm sure, moved with the times. They might even have used a computer. Or started a sentence with a conjunction.
For those curious, here is a reminder on the use of the controversial semi-colon: "The semicolon (;) ranks halfway between a comma and a full point. It may be substituted for a period between two grammatically complete sentences that are closely connected in sense; in a long or complicated sentence, it may precede a co-ordinate conjunction (such as or, and, or but)."
This advice comes from Encyclopaedia Britannica's Punctuation In English Since 1600. If the semicolon has survived the past 400 years, I think it's probably safe for a wee while longer; if only anyone knew how to use it.
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