From the Archives: Semicolon
Some recent back and forth with a long time blog reader about paper, punctuation and other writerly subjects inspired me to go back to Cecilia Watson’s Semicolon, which I reviewed in August, 2019. Here’s what I said then. I am pleased to report that the book is just as good as I remember.
If you’ve read much of my writing, you have probably figured out that I am not a member of the esteemed Semi-colon Haters Society. Personally, I find it a evocative and flexible piece of punctuation. So when I had a chance to review Cecelia Watson’s Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I grabbed it.
It did not disappoint.
On the surface, Watson’s Semicolon is a rollicking history of the punctuation mark that people love to hate. She grabbed my attention immediately with the fact that not only had someone invented the semicolon—something that had never occurred to me—but that we know who he was.*
Watson places the semicolon’s creation in the broader context of Italian humanism, when punctuation was still experimental. She considers the fate and creation of other punctuation marks. She discusses the semicolon’s role in a debate over Massachusetts’s liquor laws in the early 20th century–and the larger question of the impact of punctuation on judicial rulings. She outlines arguments used by semicolon-bashers. She reviews historical attempts to define the proper use of the semicolon.
She also examines the different ways in which five skilled and very different writers–Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Herman Melville, Rebecca Solnit and Irving Welsh–use the semicolon in their work. Watson concludes that the semicolon “represents a way to slow down, to stop, and to think.” Alternatively, it can allow a writer to speed up the pace of her text. In short, the role of the semicolon is to measure time in the pursuit of meaning.
Watson’s vision of the semicolon’s purpose points toward a subversive argument that runs alongside her history of its journey from clarity to confusion. She argues that it is impossible to untangle the history of the semicolon from the history of grammar rules and guidebooks. Looking at grammar guidebooks through the lens of the slippery semicolon, she comes to the conclusion that the written rules of language are a barrier to communication rather than a support.
Well worth the read for history buggs and grammar nerds alike.
*Venetian scholar Aldus Manutius (1449-1515). He is best known for producing high-quality, inexpensive pocket-sized editions of Greek and Latin classics—a new idea at the time. In other words, a book lover’s hero.
Florence Mendheim: Librarian Against the Nazis
Florence Mendheim (1899-1984) was the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants had moved to the United States in the 1880s and still had close contact with their family back in Berlin. She worked as a librarian in the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library for 25 years, from 1919 to 1944. In 1933, she learned that Rabbi J.X. Cohen of the American Jewish Committee wanted volunteers who were not obviously Jewish to infiltrate the growing American Nazi movement, she did not hesitate. Cohen provided her with a fake address, a fake name, and a Nazi party pin. For the next five to six years, she spent her evenings spying on American Nazis.
Under the pseudonym Gertrude Mueller, she attended meetings and rallies of the pro-Nazi group Friends of New Germany and its successor organization, German American Bund. She gathered names, took notes as a secretary for the groups, and accumulated pro-Nazi and antisemitic propaganda and literature. Sometimes at the end of the meeting, another participant would offer to drive her home, making that fake address valuable indeed. It was terrifying. She could never be sure whether the offer was made as an act of politeness or because someone suspected her.
She used two other pseudonyms as well as Gertrude Mueller. She signed her reports to the American Jewish Committee with the random initials KQX. She used the name Anna Hitler as a cover for doing research on Hitler at various academic institutes under the guise of doing genealogical research.
Mendheim appears to have quit spying in 1938 or 1939. The need for such work ended several years later. When United States entered the war at the end of 1941, they cracked down on pro-Nazi organizations, perhaps with help of reports from Florence Mendheim and others who had been brave enough to spy on pro-Nazi meetings.
From the Archives: A Brief History of the Pencil
In yesterday’s newsletter (1), I went down a research rabbit hole, looking for the difference, if any, between using blue pencils and red pencils as an editing tool. (Plus the pencil’s use by military and authoritarian censors, which is the place where I leaped into the rabbit hole.) In the process, I went back to to this brief history of the pencil, which originally ran in February, 2020.
(1) For those of you who missed the memo, I write a newsletter in addition to this blog. It comes out roughly twice a month. I generally write about thinking and writing about history, with an occasional foray into stray bits of research. It’s also the first place to find news about my books, speaking gigs, etc.
If that sounds like your cold glass of lemonade, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b I’d love to see you there.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled program:
A giant pencil that I received as a Christmas present in Nuremberg. Thanks, Christopher!
One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662.
Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I knew was that Thoreau invented a better pencil, and then got bored with the whole thing and went off to do something else. But I would have been hard pressed to tell you what made Thoreau’s pencil better. (We’ll get there in a moment.)
As those of you who have hung around here on the Margins for a while know, I can’t resist tracking down the story behind a bit of history trivia. Here’s some of what I found:
- The roman stylus is the immediate ancestor of the modern pencil: a thin metal rod that was used to make a light mark on papyrus. Some styluses were made of lead, which why we still call pencil cores leads even though they have been made of graphite ever since the stylus became a pencil.
- In fact, graphite is the reason styluses became pencils. In 1564, someone discovered a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England. Graphite makes a darker mark than lead, but it is too soft and brittle to use without something to hold it. At first, people wrapped graphite sticks in string, but eventually someone inserted a graphic stick into a hollow piece of wood. Poof! A pencil.
- The new industry/craft of pencil making was transformed in Nuremberg. As I’ve mentioned before, the Nuremberg council kept tight control over craft processes in the city. Pencil-making was seen as a two-step process, requiring craftsmen from two different trades to create a single pencil: a lead cutter to shape the graphite and a carpenter or knife handle maker to put the graphite in a wooden case. A storekeeper named Friedrich Staedtler, who was not a member of either skilled trade, figured out how to make a better pencil from start to finish. Pencil makers became a recognized craft category by the 1730s.
- I was astonished to learn that Thoreau didn’t just invent a better pencil; he revolutionized the American pencil industry. American graphite was less pure than British graphite and pencils made from it smudged. Thoreau worked for a time in his father’s pencil factory and was determined to create a better product. After hitting the books at the Harvard Library, he came up with a method of blending graphite and clay that solved the problem. The Thoreau pencil factory took off. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau also took off for Walden Pond. (FYI: He went back into the pencil business occasionally when he needed cash.)
That’s all I’ve got. If you’re interested in learning more about pencil history, everyone seems to agree that the book to read is The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski. I must admit, I’m tempted. **
*On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the history of paper, which was invented in China and then spread to Europe via the Islamic world—making it exactly the kind of thing I’m fascinated by.
**In fact, I’m tempted by several of Petroski’s books.