Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The melancholy decline of the semicolon

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 260 posts

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#71

Post by mdp2021 »

paulcole wrote: post #50
mdp2021 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to not need to use one Why should one avoid using it.

One should decide if one is using it because it’s the best way to communicate with one’s audience or if one is proud that one knows how to use a semicolon properly.

If your audience benefits from expressions that avoid semicolon, the point is in the expression, not in its nuts and bolts: you use an apt structure, which should anyway in general follow sensible rules. And you should not pollute the minds of your audience, so surely you want to avoid "reinforcing the use of something wrong by adopting it": you may, with ability, simplify a structure, but still crafting something eventually well and properly done. This rules out misplacing said "nuts and bolts".

Pride has nothing to do with it - to use logarithms for magnitudes is not "showing off".

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#72

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

> The semicolon is an element of language that communicates stops, pauses, reflections, and cigarette breaks within a sentence. It connects loose ends with disparate ideas;

In this regard I think the decline of the semicolon is related to the fact that we write knowing that our message will be competing for attention in a busy inbox or feed. Our audience is the harried, harassed reader. There’s not much room for reflection or whimsy in such settings.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#73

Post by GavinMcG »

minimilian wrote: post #41
Pxtl wrote: post #24

It can't be accidental that the article has multiple paragraphs where they use an em dash where a semicolon would've also been appropriate.

It uses an em rule where an en rule would have been correct: em rules are not surrounded by spaces.

I'm not giving in to the UK's bastardization of the en dash! The em dash was correct, it's just the spaces are wrong.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#74

Post by minimilian »

mdp2021 wrote: post #62
minimilian wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean `full-stop' in your 2nd paragraph, or are you ascribing a double role to the colon and ignoring the full-stop? According to Fowler (The King's English), there was a time when the difference between , ; : . was merely quantitative (which explains the name `semicolon').

Thank you! Now corrected. Informally: incredibly, one reads and re-reads, edits multiple times in a span of hours, and still leaves errors and imprecisions. Of course it was the period or "full-stop" - in reading, also as I had defined the colon differently in the next paragraph... By the way, you made me note that 'full-stop' is British English and 'period' is American English. As some of us prefer to write in Inter…

One advantage of `full-stop' -- apart from its being British -- is that it fits referring to the Greek semicolon as a ``half-stop''.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#75

Post by mannykannot »

darkerside wrote: post #17
im3w1l wrote: post #9

Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.

Was going to comment this. Are there any great examples in all of literature where a period would not have been a good replacement fora semicolon? As a side note, I am only a little offended by the idea that fiction writers should use semicolons to make their writing more literate or fancy. But I think simple writing is always better, even when you are trying to convey beauty. I believe great flowery literature is gr…

Asking for a "great example" of punctuation use - any punctuation - is to miss the point, which is to smooth the reader's understanding of the text in the way that inflection and cadence are used in speech. As another commenter pointed out, well-used punctuation should be invisible. Only in its absence can it be properly appreciated.

Understanding language is not a strictly linear, one-word-after-another process, and these non-lexical clues all help us converge quickly on the intended meaning.

There have been several suggestions as to what might be just as good as a semicolon, but the period is a new one to me, and I strongly suspect that there are many cases where this substitution would interrupt a reader's flow. Given the importance, semantically, of the sentence, there are probably cases where this would corrupt the meaning.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#77

Post by zuj »

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does.

(autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#78

Post by throwaway2077 »

forgatmigej wrote: post #51
bsder wrote: post #28

Meh. Grammar, in general, is on a steep suckiness trend. For example, when was the last time you saw someone on the web actually use the correct past tense of "lead (verb, transitive)"?

Some would say that a focus on proper grammar, expansive incorporated linguistical repertoires, and western/anglo-centric style is not inclusive. And I would agree. In line with your example, I have noticed "costed" used instead of "cost" increasingly often.

english is not esperanto. it happens to be the native language for a significant part of the world population, and they have no obligation to accept its bastardization for the sake of inclusivity.

in every non-western country with its own language, those "some" would get rightfully ridiculed.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#79

Post by secondcoming »

ghkbrew wrote: post #63
pwdisswordfish0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the correct past tense of lead? I thought it was “led”, but I can’t remember having ever read any other form? What often irks me, as a non-native speaker, is the wrong subjunctive (if that’s what it’s called). People say and write all the time “I wish you were there”, when they mean “I wish you had been there”. At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to be…

"I wish you were here." is grammatically correct in English. And yes it is the "subjunctive mood". Its meaning is closer to "I wish for you to be here" than "I wish you had been here". This random page I found on the internet has a pretty decent explanation of the subjunctive: https://www.learngrammar.net/a/examples-of-the-subjunctive-m...

"I wish you were _there_", not "I wish you were here"

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#80

Post by secondcoming »

hairofadog wrote: post #70
peter_retief wrote: post #5

But wait; why not give it, another chance.

I know you’re kidding but golly does comma misuse stop me in my tracks every time. I can slide past almost any other spelling or style error without a second thought, or even crazy autocorrect errors in which, say, the word “mother” has been replaced with “toaster”, but this sort of comma misuse is like nails on a chalkboard to me. And it’s rampant .

A misplaced comma can change the meaning of text entirely.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha...

Post reply on HN