or oppositional statements:
Man proposes: God disposes.
And as Shaw put it so well, the colon can simply pull up the reader for a nice surprise:
I find fault with only three things in this story of yours, Jenkins: the beginning, the middle and the end.
So colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part. They also have several formal introductory roles. They start lists (especially lists using semicolons):
In later life, Kerry-Anne found there were three qualities she disliked in other people: Britishness; superior airs; and a feigned lack of interest in her dusting of freckles.
They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:
Berks and Wankers: a pessimist’s view of language preservation
Gandhi II: The Mahatma Strikes Back
Conventionally, they separate dramatic characters from dialogue:
PHILIP : Kerry-Anne! Hold still! You’ve got some gunk on your face!
KERRY - ANNE : They’re freckles , Philip. How many more times?
They also start off long quotations and (of course) introduce examples in books on punctuation. What a useful chap the colon is, after all. Forget about counting to three, that’s all I ask.
So when do you use a semicolon? As we learned in the comma chapter, the main place for putting a semicolon if you are not John Updike is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, and where a comma would be ungrammatical:
I loved Opal Fruits; they are now called Starburst, of course.
It was the baying of an enormous hound; it came from over there!
I remember him when he couldn’t write his own name on a gate; now he’s Prime Minister.
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence. The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can’t use it wrongly – which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue. But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash. Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when theconnection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense:
I loved Opal Fruits – why did they call them Starburst? – reminds me of that joke “What did Zimbabwe used to be called? – Rhodesia. What did Iceland used to be called? – Bejam!”
So it is true that we must keep an eye on the dash – and also the ellipsis (. . .), which is turning up increasingly in emails as shorthand for “more to come, actually . . . it might be related to what I’ve just written . . . but the main thing is I haven’t finished . . . let’s just wait and see . . . I could go on like this for hours . . .” However, so long as there remain sentences on this earth that begin with capital letters and end with full stops, there will be a place for the semicolon. True, its use is never obligatory, because a full stop ought always to be an alternative. But that only makes it the more wonderful.
Popotakis had tried a cinema, a dance hall, baccarat, and miniature golf; now he had four pingpong tables. He had made good money, for thesmart set of Jacksonburg were always hard put to get through the rainy season; the polyglot professional class had made it their rendezvous; even attachés from the legislations and younger members of the Jackson family had come there.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop , 1938
The semicolon has been rightly called
Man proposes: God disposes.
And as Shaw put it so well, the colon can simply pull up the reader for a nice surprise:
I find fault with only three things in this story of yours, Jenkins: the beginning, the middle and the end.
So colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part. They also have several formal introductory roles. They start lists (especially lists using semicolons):
In later life, Kerry-Anne found there were three qualities she disliked in other people: Britishness; superior airs; and a feigned lack of interest in her dusting of freckles.
They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:
Berks and Wankers: a pessimist’s view of language preservation
Gandhi II: The Mahatma Strikes Back
Conventionally, they separate dramatic characters from dialogue:
PHILIP : Kerry-Anne! Hold still! You’ve got some gunk on your face!
KERRY - ANNE : They’re freckles , Philip. How many more times?
They also start off long quotations and (of course) introduce examples in books on punctuation. What a useful chap the colon is, after all. Forget about counting to three, that’s all I ask.
So when do you use a semicolon? As we learned in the comma chapter, the main place for putting a semicolon if you are not John Updike is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, and where a comma would be ungrammatical:
I loved Opal Fruits; they are now called Starburst, of course.
It was the baying of an enormous hound; it came from over there!
I remember him when he couldn’t write his own name on a gate; now he’s Prime Minister.
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence. The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can’t use it wrongly – which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue. But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash. Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when theconnection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense:
I loved Opal Fruits – why did they call them Starburst? – reminds me of that joke “What did Zimbabwe used to be called? – Rhodesia. What did Iceland used to be called? – Bejam!”
So it is true that we must keep an eye on the dash – and also the ellipsis (. . .), which is turning up increasingly in emails as shorthand for “more to come, actually . . . it might be related to what I’ve just written . . . but the main thing is I haven’t finished . . . let’s just wait and see . . . I could go on like this for hours . . .” However, so long as there remain sentences on this earth that begin with capital letters and end with full stops, there will be a place for the semicolon. True, its use is never obligatory, because a full stop ought always to be an alternative. But that only makes it the more wonderful.
Popotakis had tried a cinema, a dance hall, baccarat, and miniature golf; now he had four pingpong tables. He had made good money, for thesmart set of Jacksonburg were always hard put to get through the rainy season; the polyglot professional class had made it their rendezvous; even attachés from the legislations and younger members of the Jackson family had come there.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop , 1938
The semicolon has been rightly called
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