Semicolon: How a misunderstood punctuation mark can improve your writing, enrich your reading and even change your life. Cecelia Watson

enough to use a comma where he should have put a semicolon.

The Globe had good reason to raise the spectre of a punctuation-related legal battle; the new rule-based approach to punctuation had already begun to trouble the court system. Now it was not just the letter of the law but the punctuation separating those letters that judges and juries had to negotiate. Another commentator, for the Indianapolis Journal, concurred: citing four specific instances in which the semicolon had ‘made trouble in the laws’ by creating ambiguity in statutes, the author ascribed this trouble to ‘inability to fix the function of the semicolon’. Old grammar books had given the rules of punctuation in terms of pauses, and ‘if those who have been writing rules for punctuating compositions had stopped there, we would not have had all this trouble, but these teachers have been going on making new rules for years until no one can undertake to follow them, but each punctuates according to his pleasure, rather than his familiarity with the rules’. Finding the rules unhelpful, the public had run screaming in the opposite direction, punctuating willy-nilly. Therefore, the commentator opined, either the court system should write a legal treatise to define punctuation marks once and for all, or it should resolve to ignore punctuation altogether in its rulings.

But unbeknownst to the commentator, the American court system had already given the latter strategy a try, relying on old British case law for precedent. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had issued a ruling saying that punctuation had no part in statutes. This attempt to assert that Justice ought to extend her blindness to commas and semicolons was over-optimistic, and didn’t obviate any of the interpretive problems with which the law had to contend. Any remaining hope that the law could somehow escape the challenges posed by punctuation went out the window when a semicolon set about wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor in a dramatic Massachusetts court case that caused six years of controversy in courtrooms, in legislative debates, and in the streets.