I believe in semicolons.  I believe in them in much the same way that I believe in the legitimacy of direct military intervention; in other words, I believe the use of such instruments must be possible, but reserved to absolute necessity.  And necessity is always a matter of judgment, by the way, which is not codifiable in a fully articulable manner.

I also believe Joseph Epstein is, well, not my favorite writer.  His piece reviewing Cecelia Watson's book about semicolons exhibits many of his vices and few of his virtues (which were not many to begin with).

Punctuation is perhaps one-tenth rule and nine-tenths art," he says, but where he hears that as giving permission, I, in my little black-leather jackboots, I hear it as begrudgingly admitting the fact that there is a viable and useful convention that should be generally respected when it comes to punctuation usage.  By and large, people know how to use periods; they mostly know how to use commas; they most definitely over-use dashes.  But for some reason, the true evangel, the pure doctrine of the semicolon has remained hidden away.

Punctuation is "a highly personal matter" he says, which I think means he hasn't got a clue as to why you ought to do certain things beyond "it sounds good to me."  That is just a lazy indifference masquerading as a mystery.  Or a snobbery waiting in ambush.  Maybe both.

Besides which, I don't think that's quite right.  There is a lot of space between pure subjectivity and rigid rule-bound restrictions.  Besides which, here's a thought: people can be virtuosi of a skill, yet also be utterly incapable of explaining what it is they're doing, or how they manage to do it so well.  This observation has been made so many times that some people have even dared to draw the conclusion from it that the first accomplishment is incompatible with the second.  I wouldn't go that far, but I would go pretty far in that direction; the truth is, practice and theory do seem, if not quite necessarily opposed, at least frequently not on speaking terms. 

Admittedly, Watson sounds like a rather self-satisfied anarchist, prone to not taking her opponents seriously but ridiculing their views.  For instance, her affection for Moby-Dick is counterpointed by her animus towards Henry James, and both positions seem driven about the use or lack of use of semi-colons; but that seems to miss the point of James's books being in some sense the products of an amused, possibly over-eager, but fundamentally kind society gossip, where revelation sidles up to you from the side and you don't even notice it, while Melville's singular work is clearly the product of a madman, delivering the word of God right in your face, in fact trying to pass it on to you, to get it away from himself as much as give it to you, as a hot coal that's been rattling around in his head too long, or at least for long enough.  You cannot imagine either a dinner party, or a tent revival, with both James and Melville that would deliver both authors in their best impression.

But back to my complaints about Epstein.  Epstein wraps up his review of Watson, disappointingly, in this way: 

To decry another for splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, being unaware of the distinction between “uninterested” and “disinterested,” not knowing when to use “who” and when “whom,” and much more in the same line would be, in Cecelia Watson’s view, pedantic, not to say snobbishly cruel. I would myself say that it depends who is guilty of these lapses. If it is a foreign speaker of English, if it is a young person without the benefit of much schooling, if it is an older person without pretensions to being cultured, she is of course correct. But if it is someone who has those pretensions, someone who earns his or her living by the use of language — a television or print journalist, a scholar or critic, an author of books — then I would disagree. I have no hesitation, for that reason, in noting that Ms. Watson doesn’t seem to be aware of the distinction between the words “farther” and “further,” is not as alive to cliché as a serious writer ought to be, and should dispense with the useless academic phrase “in terms of.” She ought also to be disabused of the mistaken assumption that using the four-letter words that begin with “f” and “s” makes her writing seem more attractively earthy.

I should probably admit that I find this kind of puncturing of the self-proclaimed anti-pedantic quite effective.  But too often Epstein ruins the effect by wilting at the effort of explaining himself, of giving not even reasons, but reason-like explanations, things that might become reasons if allowed to age appropriately in old whiskey barrels.  He doesn't try; he just reclines on a couch made by his own complacent prejudices, which he refuses to inspect, or even acknowledge as his. 

There's another piece on the book that is also interesting.   

She’s using the curving punctuation mark as a hook on which to hang a larger argument about language and usage – namely, to elaborate on the old argument that the “rules” of grammar should be a map of the territory rather than a set of train tracks; guidelines rather than commandments.

The book seems to argue, or at least to imply, or maybe (as so many books these days do) simply and cynically to insinuate, that prescription is deeply misleading:

Most prescribed uses of the semicolon nowadays, for instance, tend to ask it to separate independent clauses; but in a list, where it’s usually used to separate phrases long enough to include a comma, there’s no requirement that those phrases have a verb. It’s a bit of a fudge. Sometimes it does one thing; sometimes it does another. And why use a semicolon rather than – as are often available as alternatives – a full stop, a dash or a colon? It’s a matter of touch and instinct. A bit of a fudge. Strict rules can’t compass that fudge, but that fudge is the semicolon’s prime glory.

Punctuation – and especially semicolon use – is more art than science, in other words. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Really brave.  I get the latent polemic against absolute rules.  But who actually believes that?  Is the idea that we are actually threatened by grammar nazis in our ordinary life?  That is not my experience of the human race.  Admittedly I have a skewed sample of humans, but the ones whose writing I encounter most commonly are eighteen to twenty-two years old, and don't seem to have encountered rules at all.

Maybe I'm a grammatical de Sade, I admit it.  That's a cruel and to my mind hyperbolic charge, but whatever.  Here's a counter-charge: maybe the anti-prescriptivists are actually lazy, unthinking relativists who refuse to believe in their own capacity to tell clear from unclear writing, by which I mean "writing that has a reasonable chance of having its intended affect on its intended audience."

Watson nowhere – though this is perhaps in line with her thesis – sets out simply in one place the supposed rules for semicolon use against which she rails. 

Maybe that is because she does not think that there are unified and fixed rules?  Apart from very formalized situations, which are effectively only in games, is there any context in which the rules are imposed with brittle absoluteness?  Seriously--in etiquette? Food recipies?  Music? Anything?  I don't think so.  Why are grammar anarchists so anxious, then?  

It's a serious question; I can't figure them out.

(P.S. Don't tell anybody I shared this with you, but for a different perspective entirely, here's the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno's essay on "punctuation marks."  You didn't know he wrote an essay on this?  Well, you do now.  You're welcome.)

(P.P.S. There's a piece by Watson herself that someone pointed out to me; in it Watson makes her work as easy for herself as I feared she would.)