by Dorine Jennette

Jessica perches on the edge of her seat, stretching the pages for class discussion taut between both sweating hands. Her eyes betray the zealot’s frightening glitter as she licks her lips and dives in to her rant against the semicolon. My eyebrows rise and rise and reach the upper limit of muscular contraction. “Blasphemy!” I whisper.

She freezes. “You actually like semicolons?”

“Are you kidding?” I blurt. “I’m a semicolon slut!” A frisson of titillation and dismay circles the table, every mouth in turn elongating into a surprised “O.”

;

The semicolon is the seal, still warm, of Eros on written language. It signifies union by a grammatical invitation to intimacy; the semicolon is the shared blush of a successful seduction. As with all seductions, the relationships between clauses joined by semicolons are ambiguous; this is not the punctuation of hierarchy, but of nuance.

Other forms of punctuation—periods, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, even the interrobang (a question mark superimposed over an exclamation point, denoting both astonishment and confusion)—exert themselves over their surrounding clauses with clear purpose: separation and stratification. The colon, for example, tells the reader that the words which follow it proceed in sequence from the words which come before. An apostrophe indicates either possession or what is left out of a word, but either way, its duty is to denote ownership and exclusion. Periods are the nuns in the dance hall of a paragraph, holding a ruler between swaying couples to make sure they are twelve inches apart. As for the comma, although it may at times approach the semicolon’s impulse toward union, it also tells us which clauses are subordinate, and to whom, and keeps the items in a list from bumping up against each other. Additionally, the comma insists on space in a sentence for pompous little interjections like indeed, and hallmarks of rhetorical sorting such as therefore and however. (In British English, where the comma may join independent clauses, the comma’s duties may overlap with the semicolon’s, but here in the U.S., it is not so.) Only the promiscuous little dash approaches the semicolon’s energy, but it is too hyper for real romance—too much the flibbertigibbet to sustain the consummation that the semicolon celebrates.

The semicolon proposes the union of equals, the lovemaking of the ideal marriage, but the semicolon does not reveal all the secrets of the bedroom. Although the use of a semicolon between what would otherwise be two sentences joins them into one sentence together, it doesn’t tell the reader why. This coy maneuver tempts the reader to make the interpretive leap and decide what links these two independent clauses, as one must sooner or later find oneself, at date’s end, on the doorstep, where one must choose, considering the evening’s sequence of feints and approaches, whether or not to lean in and try for a kiss. The semicolon invites the reader to puzzle out degrees of connection.

When the semicolon joins long, comma-inclusive items in a list, the semicolon represents, if not actual union, then the proliferation of the free-floating erotic energy that can surprise even the most sedate among us. Consider the surprisingly good-smelling neck of a colleague whose shirt tag, white and sharp cornered against her skin, begs to be tucked down; the muscular hands of a grocery checker (a hockey player on Saturdays) rolling a can of soup across the scanner; receiving the look-and-look-again, crossing the parking lot’s hot asphalt to the bank door, of even the chubbiest stranger; finding oneself, at a party, pinned to the floor by the grin of a man one would not so much as have coffee with: these moments are the semicolon’s to store, to log in its book of potentials. The semicolon holds these small, unlikely connections worthy of our appreciation.

As an agent of connection, the semicolon’s drives in syntax enact metaphor’s arrangements in image. In her essay “A Meditation on Metaphor,”^[i] Alicia Ostriker recovers metaphor’s etymology to demonstrate its nature:

Metaphor: a carrying across. You see the word on delivery vans in the dusty avenues of Athens. Metaphoros. A carrying across, a getting over, a bearing there, of what? Of course, of love. Of the erotic. Metaphor: that which joins, that which announces connection, overlap, shared essence, and yet retains the actual distance between whatever objects it brings together. (157)

The semicolon is metaphor’s syntactic equivalent, marrying clauses with the very joint that holds them apart. It is the unveiling, if not of love’s contents, then at least of love’s architecture.

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[i] Ostriker, Alicia. “A Meditation on Metaphor.” In By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry,  ed. Molly McQuade. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2000. 157–162.

DORINE JENNETTE’s poetry collection Urchin to Follow is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press in May 2010. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as the Journal, Ninth Letter, Coconut, Puerto del Sol, and The Georgia Review. She earned her PhD at the University of Georgia, and earns her keep as a copyeditor for university presses. She lives in Davis, California.