TODAY’S New York Times sent ripples of joy through the punctuation nerds community. The wonderful semicolon, long shunned as too effete, too esoteric for the masses made an appearance on that most egalitarian of places: the New York City subway.
We can thank Neil Neches, a writer for New York City Transit, for inserting a semicolon in a public service placard reminding subway riders to throw away their newspapers after reading them:
Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.
The very public revival of the semicolon prompted literate people everywhere to effusiveness, including author Frank McCourt and linguist Noam Chomsky (who took the opportunity to take a swipe at George W. Bush). Harvard professors and grammarians also chimed in with praise for the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”
I’ve been fascinated with the semicolon since I was 14. I used to read Jimmy Breslin’s syndicated column in the Rocky Mountain News and I was transfixed by his coverage of the infamous Son of Sam murders in New York City in 1977. One of the things Breslin wrote about was how well written the killer’s taunting notes were, particularly in his proper use of the semicolon. At 14, I committed myself to using semicolons whenever possible. But not because I was planning on any serial killings. Yet.
I’ll restrain myself from going on about the semicolon and focus on the part of the Mr. Neches’ placard that escaped the view of everyone focused on the semicolon, namely the first sentence of the ad:
It doesn’t matter what paper you read, its language or viewpoints.
For all Mr. Neches’ attention to the proper use of the semicolon he neglected to ensure that his first sentence was a complete one; it’s a fragment with no verb. My friend Charles also pointed out that the more proper phrase would have been: It doesn’t matter which paper you read…
