I Love Semicolons

. . . Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

Roy Peter Clark, who blogs about grammar and usage at Poynter Online, was more restrained, but still suspicious. The semicolon, he wrote last month, looks "like an ink smudge on a new white carpet." And he's unnerved by its "arbitrariness, as if the semicolon were a mark of choice rather than rule." (Which it is - there's that nuance and complexity again!) . . .

Sex and the semicolon

Interesting Parallels:

. . . Republicans, of course, don't have the burden Democrats do; by and large, they don't do nuance. On abortion (outlaw it), immigration (build a fence) and just about every other issue you can name, they are as clear and blunt as a punch in the nose. There is a stark simplicity to their positions that is undeniably appealing.

But if these last years have taught us nothing else, they've taught us not to mistake stark simplicity for wisdom. That, after all, was supposed to have been the key to George W. Bush's appeal: He was a plain-spoken guy of plainspoken values, not some egghead intellectual elitist noodling around in shades of gray.

Seven years later, we see where that's gotten us. The one thing most of us agree on is that the country is a mess.

It's something to remember as candidates struggle to explain who they are and what they believe, something these last years should have made abundantly clear.

The simplest answer is not always the best.

Thoughtful questions, candid answers