Two Great Parties

And all of this work is miserably pun-itive.

How fortunate we find ourselves now and what thanks we owe to you most learned professor Holbo, leading us out of the dimness of post-modernism thus; how we have been living in the dark all these long years without a guide to the laws of the rise and fall of empires, like confused hens; how opportune this moment has come at last , just as we poor commenters were encircled by permanent nightfall and contending between ourselves with comments blindly made about the death or otherwise of grand narratives without enough citations ; how my foolish comments are now proven wrong , my very footsteps missteps; how bright now is the beam of light shining upon our heretofore shadowy path as we learn empires rise and fall in accordance with the use of punctuation markings; how uninformed those that passed before us casting their unenlightened eyes to the stars in the sky to tell them their fortunes; how lost our sorry contemporaries contenting themselves with discussions of whether r is greater than g , mere alphabet letterings; how we must bow down to your herculean speculative efforts and orient ourselves in the rise and decline of tides of civilisation through thorough and judicious examination of punctuation; how our age shall rejoice to be found and named at last when, in order to rise to civilised heights once again, all peoples shall employ formal english in this newly glad age, the Age of Punctuation Restoration.

Wasn’t Bolingbroke noted for emulating Alcibiades rather than Thucydides, and lacking principle, purpose or path?

For Holbo’s history with the semicolon, see, e.g., https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/20/its-alive/ (“I’m convinced that the main export of Victorian England was the overused semicolon.”)

ZM – are you a fan of AP style? The “professor Holbo” seems to indicate such a leaning… (though that particular rule makes no sense to me.)

John Holbo: “And is not the ultimate break-up of the British Empire perhaps a phenomenon to be studied in parallel with, so to speak, post-semicolonial studies?”

I guess semi-colonial explains that era. But what to glean from post-comma era of now? Is the entire world breaking apart now (or perhaps just the US) due to the loss of the comma and other tools of grammar? (Or are your students still handy with the comma?)

One reason the Victorians, at least, overused semicolons was that many of those authors practiced “rhetorical” punctuation: comma for a brief pause, semicolon for longer than that, colon or dash for longer still ….

English grammar, like English literature, was a slow starter as a school subject. Gentlemen’s sons did not attend school to learn their *own* language; they attended school to learn Latin (and, if unlucky, Greek). So the modern rules of semicolon usage hadn’t been publicized (or perhaps even contrived). One’s sense of punctuation depended on one’s sense of rhetoric and experience in reading.

The beleaguered, disrespected semicolon, wandering the glyph-o-sphere as a wink.

When a text reaches a certain age, it ought to be given a semicolonoscopy.

Isn’t that simply how people wrote at the time? And isn’t our own sense of ridicule at such a sentence simply the product of the writing preferences of our time, which are not inherently superior to those of other times? How did his contemporaries judge his grammar?

Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Marcel Proust:
Those high white curtains which hid from the eyes the bed placed as if in the rear of a sanctuary; the scattering of light silk counterpanes, of quilts with flowers, of embroidered bedspreads, of linen pillowcases, this scattering under which it disappeared in the daytime, as an altar in the month of Mary under festoons and flowers, and which, in the evening, in order to go to bed, I would place cautiously on an armchair where they consented to spend the night; by the bed, the trinity of the glass with blue patterns, the matching sugar bowl, and the decanter (always empty, since the day after my arrival, by order of my aunt who was afraid to see it “spill”), these instruments, as it were, of the cult-almost as sacred as the precious orange blossom liqueur placed near them in a glass phial-,which I would no more have thought of profaning nor even of possibly using for myself than if they had been consecrated ciboria, but which I would examine a long time before undressing, for fear of upsetting them by a false motion; those little crocheted open-work stoles which threw on the backs of the armchair a mantel of white roses that must not have been without thorns since every time I was through reading and wanted to I noticed I remained caught in them; that glass bell on which, isolated from vulgar contacts, the clock was babbling privately for shells come from far away and for an old sentimental flower, but which was so heavy to lift that when the clock stopped, nobody but the clock-maker would have been foolhardy enough to undertake to wind it up; that very white guipure tablecloth which, thrown as an altar runner across the chest of drawers adorned with two vases, a picture of the Savior, and a twig of blessed boxwood made it resemble the Lord’s Table (of which a priedieu, placed there every day, when the room war “done,” finished evoking the idea), but whose frayings always catching in the chinks of the drawers stopped their movement so completely that I could never take out a handkerchief without at once knocking down the picture of the Savior, the sacred vases, the twig of blessed boxwood, and without stumbling and catching hold of the priedieu; finally, that triple layer of little bolting-cloth curtains, of large muslin curtains, and of larger dimity curtains always smiling in their often sunny hawthorn whiteness, but in reality very irritating in their awkwardness and stubbornness in playing around the parallel wooden bars and tangling in one another and getting all in the window as soon as I wanted to open or close it, -a second one being always ready if I succeeded in extricating the first to come to take its place immediately in the cracks as perfectly plugged by them as they would have been by a real hawthorn bush or by nests of swallows that might have had the fancy to settle there, so that this operation, in appearance so simple, of opening or closing my window, I never succeeded in doing without the help of someone in the house; all those things which not only could not answer any of my needs, but were even an impediment however slight, to their satisfaction, which evidently had never been placed there for someone’s use, peopled my room with thoughts somehow personal, with that air of predilection, of having chosen to live there and delighting in it, which, often the trees in a clearing and the flowers on the road side or on old walls have.

James Agee:
A house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight, and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence; that this beauty is made between hurt but invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise.

23

How long is it?!

Strunk and White, Hemingway, and Orwell have put an end to that nonsense, but I miss it greatly.

My addiction in parentheses. I have caught myself putting parenthetical phrases inside parenthetical phrases.

Regarding Trader Joe’s strictures on the use of exclamation points: I set up my company’s first email system using UUCP, which used bang-paths for routing. There was nothing perceptibly untoward in the messages exchanged, but the details of their transmission were comically emphatic.

“It was a dark and stormy night —- ” etc, etc; etc:, etc–

Cormac McCarthy on the semicolon:

http://paperpools.blogspot.com/2007/08/cormac-mccarthy-semi-colon.html?m=1

Semicolonials aside, is it normal to call Henry St John “Henry Bolingbroke”? To me Bolingbroke is John of Gaunt’s son.

We had a comp lit professor as Treasurer of our Co-Op for two years. That’s what our financial statements looked like.

Much too linear to be Thucydidean; this is just a series of independent clauses linked by semi-colons, rather than a complex web of sub-clauses, parentheses, antitheses and participles that, making little sense in a non-inflected language, render attempts at literal translation virtually impossible and positively demand rather than merely permitting great licence to the benighted translator, who might well remark, echoing Leonardi Bruni, on how many sleepness nights would be required for such a task.