Why did the semicolon survive and thrive when other marks did not? Probably because it was useful. For instance, there was once a punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark, which was a mirror-image version of the question mark. There were marks for the minutest distinctions and the most specific occasions. Some of the printed texts that appeared in the centuries surrounding the semicolon’s birth look as though they are written partially in secret code: they are filled with mysterious dots, dashes, swoops, and curlicues. The humanists tried out a lot of new punctuation ideas, but most of those marks had short life spans. The semicolon had successfully colonized the letter cases of the best presses in Europe, but other newborn punctuation marks were not so lucky. (For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”) Gill Sans MT’s semicolon has perfect posture, while Didot’s puffs its chest out pridefully. We moderns have accumulated a host of characterful semicolons to choose from: Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. If you look closely, you’ll see that the dot-and- curve combination is raised higher up than a semicolon it’s positioned on the same level as the words in the text because it’s shorthand for a word instead of a signal to pause. You might think you see eight, but beware! That semicolonish mark at the end of the fourth line from the bottom isn’t a semicolon, it’s an abbreviation for que, Latin for “and.” In this case, it’s helping to shorten neque, or “also not.” It appears elsewhere in in the excerpt, always filling in the -ue part of a que. In this snippet, you can see four of these brand-new semicolons. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494.
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