A very clever article in the New York Times by Sam Roberts on an unlikely semicolon sighting.Roberts was riding a New York City subway when he noticed the following public service message re: proper disposal of newspapers:
“Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.â€
Roberts was so taken aback by the correct usage of a semicolon that he called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to find out who was responsible for that “pretentious anachronism.†The culprit was Neil Neches, a manager in the MTA’s marketing and service information department. Neches, a graduate of Brooklyn College, majored in English and received a masters degree in creative writing.
Roberts then asked literary and journalistic luminaries what they thought about Neches’ subway semicolon. Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes and a former English teacher at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, described the semicolon as a yellow traffic light in a “New York sentence;†Louis Menand, staff writer at New Yorker magazine and an English professor at Harvard, thought Neches’ usage was “impeccable;†Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, said that it was a “lovely example of proper punctuation;†Allan M. Siegal, co-author of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, said that although the use of the semicolon was correct, he thought that the use of a colon “would be a bit more sophisticated;†and finally, renowned linguist and political activist/gadfly, Noam Chomsky, stayed in character, saying that, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.â€
In a world of emails and text messages, where sentences are short and barely punctuated, Roberts concludes that the noble semicolon has little utility beyond its use as an emoticon symbolizing a wink.
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