The leaves that hung but never grew

New York has been celebrating the semicolon; a development as welcome as it is unexpected. According to the New York Times, an announcement about the disposal of newspapers, posted on the city's subway, which was to have read: "Please put it in a trash can, that's good news for everyone" was amended by some scholarly hand in the marketing department to insert a semicolon in place of its comma. Congratulations have followed, and rightly; it is usually seen as bad practice to join two sentences together with a mere comma, that is something only the semi-literate do. — The Guardian

Very neat. Very snide. I have to admit, it made me laugh.


Among the signs that more particularly betray the uneducated writer is inability to see when a comma is not a sufficient stop. Unfortunately little more can be done than to warn beginners that any serious slip here is much worse than they will probably suppose, and recommend them to observe the practice of good writers.

It is roughly true that grammatically independent sentences should be parted by at least a semicolon; but … there are very large exceptions to this …

These we shall only be able to indicate very loosely. There are three conditions that may favour the reduction of the semicolon to a comma: (1) Those coordinating conjunctions which are most common tend in the order of their commonness to be humble, and to recognize a comma as sufficient for their dignity. The order may perhaps be given as: and, or, but, so, nor, for; conjunctions less common than these should scarcely ever be used with less than a semicolon; and many good writers would refuse to put a mere comma before for. (2) Shortness and lightness of the sentence joined on helps to lessen the need for a heavy stop. (3) Intimate connexion in thought with the preceding sentence has the same effect.

Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) and Francis George Fowler (1870–1918)

from The King’s English (3rd edition, 1931)


Pronouns & pronominal adjectives are rather tricky than difficult. Those who go wrong over them do so from heedlessness … It is enough to state the dangers very shortly … 1. There must be a principal in existence for the pronoun or proxy to act for. 2. The principal should not be very far off. 3. There should not be two parties justifying even a momentary doubt about which the pronoun represents …

H. W. Fowler

from A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)


tag: grammar

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