Are semicolons a girl thing? Salon editor Sarah Hepola wants to know. When Editrix interviewed her a few weeks ago, Hepola said without hesitation that her favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon. As she writes in Broadsheet, a Salon blog:
To me, the semicolon has a certain elegance, like a vodka martini; I don't whip it out every day, but on occasion, and with great relish. So it was with shock that I read a recent Boston Globe article suggesting that my favorite punctuation mark is ... girlie?
To put that assertion to the test, Hepola assembled a panel of Salon writers (Page Rockwell: "I love the semicolon. But then, I also love the eyelash curler").
Personally, I've always thought of semicolons as masculine--effete masculine, perhaps (the tweedy professor pauses for effect, but doesn't come to a full stop), but XY nonetheless.
You want feminine punctuation? Well, a (male) creative-writing teacher used to fill the margins of my papers with admonitions to "get rid of that schoolgirl dash." That's right, the em dash: that long straight line leading to a literary ejaculation. Schoolgirl?
I'm sticking to my em dashes--and my semicolons, too; thanks very much. The real girly mark, for me, is the excessive ellipsis. You know ... those sentences that just ... trail off ... like the annoying rising inflection at the end of a sentence ... all vaporous and ... oh gosh, what was I saying ...
Totally girly.
"...like a vodka martini; I don't whip it out every day, but on occasion, and with great relish."
I have always preferred an olive.
Posted by: Michael | August 20, 2008 at 10:05 PM
...
Hmm. I overuse them all. I wonder what that means...
...tom...
.
Posted by: ...tom... | August 21, 2008 at 07:23 AM
I'm quite fond of the em dash myself. Oh, and parentheses. I completely agree about ellipses being girlie, though. Now I wonder what the most masculine punctuation mark is.
Posted by: Jonathon | August 21, 2008 at 11:10 AM
Gosh, my two faves are em dashes and ellipses. We even named a cat Ellipsis (she had three dots on her forehead). Like, Tom, I wonder what it means.
...Susan
Posted by: Susan | August 21, 2008 at 12:43 PM
My mom LOVES the em dashes and the ellipsis. She'd probably bristle at being told they're girly, though!
Posted by: Erin | August 21, 2008 at 01:26 PM
Candidates for most masculine punctuation marks:
* Vertical bar: '|', not much call for it outside of math and programming
* Colon-dash: ':-', also known, I kid you not, as "dog's bollocks" (http://www.oed.com/bbcwords/dog-bollocks-new.html)
* punctuation marks we dont need no stinkin punctuation marks
Posted by: Janet Swisher | August 21, 2008 at 01:53 PM
Gah! I love ellipses ... use them all the time ... hate that girly trailing off ... might have to rethink ...
Posted by: mighty red pen | August 21, 2008 at 04:49 PM
I admit to using a lot of ellipses... but only in scripts. They're very useful when you want to make it easy for someone to sight read narration or dialogue.
As I get older it seems that more and more professional voiceover artists and actors were not properly trained and sometimes struggle to read what's in front of them.
I accept it's not always the proper use of the ellipsis... but it works.
Posted by: John Russell | August 22, 2008 at 06:32 AM
Do note that you can use real em-dashes on the web with the HTML entity "ampersand"mdash; (stripped out of the comment form by over-zealous Typepad though — the result should be "—").
Posted by: mark (the ideophone) | August 22, 2008 at 07:21 AM
@mark (the ideophone): Thanks for the reminder. I use HTML in my blog for some marks such as accents. Trouble is, I use so many em dashes and it's such a nuisance to switch from rich text to HTML in TypePad (especially the "new, improved"--ha-ha--beta TypePad).
Update: I tried the code Mark suggested; didn't work. What does work is . But every time I switch from HTML to rich text TypePad puts me back at the beginning of the post. Really annoying.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | August 22, 2008 at 10:30 AM
I love the semi-colon; it's so perfect for its purpose! I'll use em-dashes and ellipses as well when I want to emphasize a pause in a place where a comma would be too quickly consumed. I never thought of punctuation as being masculine or feminine...unless you happened to dot your i's with hearts or circles.
Posted by: Night Writer | August 22, 2008 at 11:41 AM
I use them all to excess. Perhaps I am still working out my sexuality.
Posted by: Jon Carroll | August 25, 2008 at 11:38 AM