Apparently. Jan Freeman in an article, Sex and the semicolon, reports the views of Ben McIntyre writing for the Times of London (otherwise unattributed—like many sites relying on advertising, the Boston Globe seems not to use external links, see O’Reilly for an explanation):
Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”
Typographic rage rears its ugly head again!
I am unsure what about the semicolon could raise such ire. It is true that I rarely, if at all, use semicolons. But this a manifestation of neither principle nor ill-will. At one point, in a desperate bid to improve the clarity of my writing, I resolved to write in a ruthlessly simple manner. My prose has since loosened up (and continued to improve, I hope). But in moving away from an adolescent penchant for syntactic complexity, I seem to have lost my grip on when, exactly, to deploy semicolons. So no anti-semicolon policy, just punctuation ignorance.
Paul Collins reports that semicolon rage is far from new:
When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn’t over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. “The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm,” noted the Times. “His adversary maintained that it should be a colon.”
(Slate, unlike the Boston Globe, helpfully provides a plethora of external links.)
Paul Butterworth, in a piece published in the Financial Times, seeks a rationale for what might otherwise appear to be an irrational hostility. Unfortunately, the rationale is spurious, and the hostility is manifestly irrational. What we get is the chicken little rant familiar from prescriptivist grammarians transposed to the typographic:
“The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism,” explains Kinsley, “is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is. I suppose there are worse crimes in the world. (I don’t know if Osama bin Laden uses semicolons or not.) But Fred did have it right.”
Real men don’t use semicolons; though maybe Al Qaeda does. ;P
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