Ben Macintyre of
The Times
is against the bid to flush semicolons out of our prose — what he calls
"semi-colonic irrigation." He makes the following lovely point:
The beauty of the semi-colon lies in
its very vagueness. It indicates both connection and division. It is a
gentle way of connecting thoughts, without applying the abrupt brake of
a full stop or the breathiness of a comma. It implies a qualification
or refinement of the idea stated in the first part of the sentence.
Sometimes a string of semi-colons shows an evolving idea or
description, a string of interconnected ideas.
Virginia Woolf opens Mrs Dalloway with a lovely spray of semi-colons:
“How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the
early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and
sharp and yet (for a girl of 18 as she was then) solemn, feeling as she
did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about
to happen; looking at the tress with smoke winding off them and the
rooks rising, falling; standing and looking . . . ”
