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II

       The Science of Semicolons

      English Grammar Wars

Goold Brown, an American schoolteacher and grammar obsessive, had a lofty ambition: he wanted to produce ‘something like a complete grammar of the English language’. Twenty-seven years after first resolving to undertake this task, he finally published The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection* of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1851 printing of his own book.†

Where were all of these grammar books that Goold Brown surveyed coming from, and what had made them explode in number so suddenly, after several quiet centuries of minimal punctuation guidance for writers? A jaunt through some of the most popular grammar books of the nineteenth century will reveal that their authors were shrewd entrepreneurs taking advantage of a newly developed and highly lucrative market for education in English writing; in both America and Britain, access to public education expanded exponentially over the course of the nineteenth century, and with it, the opportunity to make a killing supplying schools with teaching materials. These early grammarians were also masters of the biting insult, as they jockeyed for position (and market share) with one another. And – perhaps most surprisingly – they were aspiring scientists. We have to understand the great shift these authors created in the way people thought about English grammar in order to understand the semicolon’s transformation: although these first professional grammarians sought clarity through rules, they ended up creating confusion, and the semicolon was collateral damage.

The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth, a bishop in the Church of England and a professor of poetry at Oxford,‡ used his platform to boldly announce that it was his aim to ‘lay down rules’ for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time – true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.

Even though Lowth didn’t hesitate to perpetrate brow-raising ‘corrections’ on writers who seem, well, pretty competent, he did still carry with him the legacy of the previous centuries’ emphasis on personal taste and style, and he reserved a place for individual discretion, particularly when it came to punctuation. For punctuation, he acknowledged, ‘few precise rules can be given, which will hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgment and taste of the writer’. As we’ve seen before, the marks of punctuation were analogous to the rests in a piece of music, and were to be applied as individual circumstances and preferences dictated. The comma thus was a pause shorter than the semicolon, and the semicolon was a pause shorter than the colon.

      Shakespeare and Milton, both very improper!

Lowth’s book reigned supreme in both the UK and the US for a couple of decades, until an American grammarian, Lindley Murray, came along and decided he could probably sell a few books himself if he tweaked Lowth’s work a bit by increasing its structural precision and its rigidity. In order to rebuild the book in this way, he divided it into sections and numbered its rules. Murray retitled this new version English Grammar. To say that English Grammar was a blockbuster success is an understatement. The book went into twenty-four editions, reprinted by sixteen different American publishers between 1797 and 1870, and it sold so many copies that Murray was ‘the best-selling producer of books in the world’ between 1800 and 1840.

Lowth giving Shakespeare a little lesson in grammar and poetry writing.*

      * You will notice an odd typographical quirk in Lowth’s text: the ‘Medial S’, which looks to the modern eye like an f but is to be read as an s. The Medial S can lead to some unintentionally seedy reading in books that are reprinted in facsimile edition, like Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, which contains a long section in which the author describes sucking air through a tube for an experiment.

Just as Murray found success renovating Lowth’s foundations, so Murray’s grammar had some additions nailed on by another upstart grammarian, Samuel Kirkham. Kirkham’s 1823 grammar gradually displaced its archetype. Where Murray’s grammar had gone into a dizzying twenty-four editions, Kirkham’s went into at least one hundred and ten. Kirkham won over readers by presenting a new system of parsing verbs, and by extending his predecessors’ criticisms of ‘false syntax’ in historical English. Even as Kirkham’s book represented a further step towards more rules and more systematisation, the very first edition of his grammar omitted punctuation entirely, on the grounds that it was part of prosody rather than grammar: in other words, punctuation was all about establishing rhythm, intonation, and stresses. This stance got Kirkham some critical reviews, however; as a consequence, subsequent editions covered punctuation – but only briefly, and only by nebulously describing punctuation marks as pauses of varying lengths. Thus, for the king of nineteenth-century grammar-book sales, punctuation remained a tool that writers could wield with a good bit of flexibility and discretion.

With sales of his book so high, Kirkham was in the spotlight. Not only did that open him up to attack, but it even allowed him to cultivate a proper nemesis. That nemesis was Goold Brown, the grammar surveyor in whose gargantuan book Kirkham was but one of hundreds of other people plying the same trade. But out of all those grammarians, Kirkham was the one who most got under Brown’s skin. As Brown saw it, Kirkham had played fast and loose with grammar, and cared more about his bottom line than about scientific scruples: he wanted to ‘veer his course according to the trade-wind’, Brown sniped. In Brown’s eyes, when Kirkham revised his grammar book to include punctuation, the additions represented not honest scholarly progression but mercenary modifications: ‘his whole design’ was a ‘paltry scheme of present income’. And – Brown added – Kirkham’s character was such that he was ‘filled with glad wonder at his own popularity’. Labelling Kirkham a quack and a plagiarist, Brown tore into his grammar book on page after page, pointing out its logical contradictions and omissions. Interspersed

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