Once dismissed as a fussy, somewhat effete affectation, the white-gloved cousin to the callused, workaholic comma or brutally abrupt period, the semicolon might be coming into its own.

Most people, truth to tell, seem somewhat intimidated by the semicolon; it smacks of deep thoughts and book-lined studies, of long, thoughtful pauses accompanied by rhythmic strokes of the chin. The marks are "so pipe-smokingly Indo-European," essayist Nicholas Baker wrote.

Hence, semicolons historically were deftly avoided. They were the fine china of the punctuation world, when plastic forks would do.

"I've never really been comfortable with semicolons," admits Harold Hirshman, an attorney with Sonnenschein Noth & Rosenthal. "If anything, I'm a comma person."

But if Hirshman wants to be hip, he'll have to start adorning his correspondence with semicolons, those little dot-and-fishtail concoctions that endow sentences with emotional nuance as well as serve a grammatical task.

"Wit," the play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, features a semicolon as a major plot point; a semicolon also figures in newspaper ads for the play, as the mark replaces the second letter of the title.

Semicolons have also come to figure prominently in the newest of writing genres, e-mail correspondence; they serve as what Baker calls "emotional punctuation." A semicolon is essential to the wink or smirk: ;-).

A semicolon reference in the season finale of "Sports Night," the critically acclaimed ABC sitcom -- "Why don't we use semicolons anymore?" the producer Dana (Felicity Huffman) asks her staff -- is further proof that semicolons are hot stuff; they bristle with buzz.

(The only speed bump encountered by the semicolon bandwagon was a story in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which Alberto Manguel called the period the best punctuation mark of the millennium. The period is, he said unconvincingly, "the unsung legislator of our writing system.")

Among punctuation marks, most linguists agree, the semicolon is a relative newcomer, lagging behind the period, colon and comma. Of course, punctuation itself did not become a standard part of written discourse until the late 18th century. Composition had been a haphazard enterprise at best, with writers employing punctuation marks when and how they chose. Spelling, too, was a matter of personal whim -- and for some, it still is.

In the earliest writing of which we have samples, words weren't separated at all; everything was jammed together in a long, confusing string, says Andrea Lunsford, English professor at Ohio State University.

Rudimentary punctuation marks were employed by Greek and Roman writers. The first time a semicolon seems to have appeared -- scholars still disagree, hence the hedging -- is in a ninth-century Greek text. Those primitive semicolons, however, were inverted; the comma part was on top and the period part on the bottom.

The semicolon first appeared in English writing around 1560, according to Paul Bruthiaux in his 1995 article in Applied Linguistics magazine, "The Rise and Fall of the Semicolon."

Semicolons showed up in a 1609 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets; ditto for a 1612 edition of John Donne's works. By the late 18th century, Bruthiaux wrote, the semicolon had been accepted by British and European writers. (Some holdouts remained, then and now; Anatole France, a 19th-century critic, called the semicolon "a symptom of mental weakness." Twentieth-century writer Donald Barthelme said a semicolon was "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly.")

Semicolons function several ways in sentences. They can divide coordinate clauses that are complete in themselves; they can replace commas, indicating a longer pause; they can separate items in a list.

But the way we feel about a punctuation mark might be almost as important as its grammatical task. As Mina Shaughnessy, a leading composition theoretician, has written, "Punctuation marks produce different psychological effects -- on the writer as well as the reader." The semicolon is a mighty punctuation mark, she believes, because it "has the linking power of a comma and the terminating authority of a period."

Yet to most readers, semicolons are imbued with a decidedly languid, late-afternoon feel; when semicolons are present, you can almost hear the elegant china cup clink as it is gently replaced in the saucer. Gender stereotypes also come into play; semicolons seem most closely associated with the florid, emotional writing often ascribed to women rather than the spare, chiseled prose with which men generally are credited.

Geoffrey Nunberg, principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a linguistics professor at Stanford University, confirms that the semicolon's reputation is a bit flighty and frivolous, more closely aligned to, say, taffeta-bedecked debutantes than to leather-jacketed bomber pilots.

"People seem to feel it's the icing on the cake -- a nice mark to have around, but the nation won't fall if students lose their grip on it," he says. Conversely, the comma is "a nuts-and-bolts mark."

Punctuation can sound boring because, typically, it is dealt with in a dull handbook in English class, in which it is reduced to a set of grim rules. In a 1990 article in The Antioch Review, Theodor W. Adorno called punctuation "traffic signals." How poetic is that?

It required linguists such as Nunberg and his colleagues to reveal the beauty and mystery of punctuation marks, to awaken us to the subtle emotional and psychological distinction of semicolon use.

"The semicolon seems to be reserved now for certain kinds of highbrow and high-middlebrow writing," Nunberg says. "You find them in The New Republic but not in USA Today, in academic histories but not in celebrity bios. There's a sense that the mark presupposes a reader with time on his or her hands and a comfortable chair to sit in."

Traditionally, students have been a bit intimidated by the semicolon, says Judith Gardiner, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "They tend not to use it. It's designed for relatively complicated thoughts and sentences. The tendency is to want to be short and snappy, to come to the point."

For adventurous students, Gardiner says the semicolon has become an irresistible challenge. Compared with the bungee jump of attempting a semicolon, employing a comma packs all the adrenalin rush of stepping off a curb when you have a "Walk" light. "Students who do use the semicolon tend to know what they're doing," she says.

That confidence in semicolon deployment increasingly is visible even at the high school level, several English teachers say. Sara Garnes, a linguist at Ohio State University who confers often with secondary-school teachers, contends that semicolons bring a sense of panache to the presumably staid, boring world of punctuation. Thrill-seeking students might have figured out that semicolons are a quick way to perk up one's tired old term paper, to add an instant patina of class.

Legal writing, with its reputation for labyrinthine circumlocution, would seem to be rife with semicolons. Yet that's only half true, according to Hirshman. In writing about litigation, the marks are virtually nonexistent: "The idea is to keep it simple. You're writing about history -- what happened and who's to blame."

Contracts, the other kind of legal writing, surge with semicolons: "You're trying to hedge or clarify some statement," says Hirshman, "and you don't want the confusion of moving it to another sentence. Contracts are about the future -- it's trying to control the future with words."

Nowhere is the distinction between the comma and semicolon rendered with more poignancy than in the climax of "Wit." Vivian, the protagonist, who is dying of ovarian cancer, recalls a pivotal confrontation in her college days, when a crusty scholar chides her for using a second-rate edition of Donne's "Holy Sonnets." In the corrupt copy, the final sentence of his famous sonnet on death ("And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die") appears with a semicolon instead of a comma.

Vivian remembers the professor's lesson:

"Nothing but a breath -- a comma -- separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage. . . . This way, this uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma."

Pub Date: 6/26/99