Some may begin to think that in treating of grammar we are dealing with something too various and changeable for the understanding to grasp; a dodging Proteus of the imagination, who is ever ready to assume some new shape, and elude the vigilance of the inquirer. But let the reader or student do his part; and, if he please, follow us with attention. We will endeavor, with welded links, to bind this Proteus, in such a manner that he shall neither escape from our hold, nor fail to give to the consulter an intelligible and satisfactory response. Be not discouraged, generous youth.
Brown’s labours may have been Herculean in scope, but they were still insufficient to solidify the fluid laws of grammar. Whenever grammarians tried to pin down punctuation marks with rules, they inevitably slipped their restraints, no matter whether they were shackled with a few broad rules or a hundred narrow ones. This Proteus didn’t stop shifting shapes, it was just that now he had a heavy chain awkwardly dangling from his heels as he did so. The thorny relationship between rules and usage came to play a major role in the fate of our hero, the semicolon.
* I’m surprised he could bring himself to use a selection. Brown was a thorough guy, the type of person who dated his copy of Churchill’s English Grammar ‘AD 1824’, lest anyone mistakenly think he might have bought it in 1824 BC.
† My copy of Brown’s compendium is a menacing leather-bound brick measuring 9¾ inches by 6½ inches by 3 inches and tipping the scales at 4 pounds 15 ounces. It’s caused my checked baggage to violate airline weight allowances on three occasions.
‡ Lowth, obviously, was English – unlike Brown, the American meta-grammarian who opened this chapter. I’ll bounce back and forth across the Atlantic throughout this chapter, but not without reason. In the nineteenth century, the most influential grammar books enjoyed the same freedom to be bought, taught, and sold on both sides of the pond. This makes a good deal of sense when you think about it: in matters of grammar, differences between British and American English are far slighter than in matters of vocabulary and idiom. In this respect, the distinction between American and British English is analogous to distinctions you’ll have encountered within Britain itself: whether you put your bacon on a cob, bap, barm, bun, or roll, you were taught the same grammar rules in primary school as anyone you meet from another region. And that’s not the only reason nineteenth-century grammar books were able to slip across borders so easily; frequently the matters on which American and British punctuation have come to differ weren’t even mentioned in the books. Peter Bullions, for instance, a New Yorker whose grammar had one of the longer sections on punctuation available at the time, doesn’t say a word about where punctuation should fall relative to quotation marks. Whether you want your full stops and commas included in (American style) or excluded from (British style) the quotation mark’s embrace, you’d find nothing in many of the original grammar rule books to help or hinder you. Even Noah Webster, who advocated fiercely for a uniquely American language befitting a unique new government, didn’t distinguish between American and British punctuation styles in his 1822 grammar book. And Robert Lowth, the Englishman we’re now discussing, used full stops after abbreviations like ‘Mr.’, which we now think of as American-style punctuation.
§ When Brown wasn’t tearing up the work of other grammarians, he made his own constructive suggestions for reform. One of my favourites of his ideas was to rename the exclamation point the ‘eroteme’, since it is a mark of passion. (From the Greek έρως [eros], meaning ‘love’ or ‘desire’.)
¶ This title sounded so ridiculous to me that I was convinced it was a joke the first time I saw a reference to it in the long-defunct London newspaper The Penny Satirist. But it turns out that the book is very much real and Mudie was very much serious, and in typical nineteenth-century grammarian style, he talked plenty of trash about his peers’ ostentation and the inefficiency of their methods.
** Believe it or not, this is a relatively pithy title for a nineteenth-century book; some of them really took the term title page to be an imperative to fill the whole sheet.
†† Morris is probably my favourite grammarian. What can I say? I like a sharp-spoken rebel.
‡‡ Morris, as a ‘new grammarian’ committed to observation of English, left Pope and Milton alone, unlike his predecessors. Instead of correcting the classics, the new generation of grammarians decided to amend each other’s work instead, sometimes to absurd and comical effect. Alfred Ayres, a grammarian and elocutionist who edited an 1893 edition of The English Grammar of William Cobbett, praised the book as ‘probably the most readable grammar ever written’. Nonetheless, Ayres demurred, Cobbett’s grammar had become a little bit dated in the fifty years that had passed since it was first printed. Ayres, as editor, felt it was his duty to repair Cobbett’s mistakes by inserting bracketed corrections throughout the book. Thus Ayres turned this example sentence from Cobbett’s original: ‘And that it was this which made that false which would otherwise have been, and which was intended to be, true!’ into: ‘And that it was this which [that] made that false which [that] would otherwise have been, and which [that] was intended to be, true!’ So much for Cobbett’s vaunted ‘readability’.
§§ People like Robert Lowth are typically termed ‘prescriptivists’, and grammarians like Isaiah Morris ‘descriptivists’. Prescriptivists give rules about how language ought to be, while descriptivists want to observe and describe language. These categories are unfairly extreme in the case of nineteenth-century grammarians. They give the impression that supposed prescriptivists (like Lowth and his adherents) laid down laws without recognising that a writer’s taste was still important, and they give the impression that supposed descriptivists (Morris and his ilk) just described language in action without trying to give any laws. The truth is much more complicated. All of these grammarians, negotiating the competing demands of rules and personal taste, were much more nuanced than dumping them into prescriptivist or descriptivist camps would indicate. In fact, one of the things that’s most fascinating about reading grammars from Lowth’s and Morris’s times is how plain it is on the face of the texts that the grammarians were struggling with this fundamental problem of grammar.
III
In early spring of 1857, a writer for the Chicago Daily Tribune took a stroll through the streets of Chicago, making a note of facial hair trends for an article in the paper. Particularly popular was a moustache combined with a small goatee: ‘Forty-three wore the moustache with a fancy tuft upon the chin, but with smooth cheeks; looking as if a semicolon was the best representation of their idea of facial adornment.’
The comparison was apt: semicolons were trendy in any form, follicular or literary.
For