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Idaho Enterprise

Word Worries

Dec 31, 2024 11:40AM ● By Brandon Hall

Let’s just get the hardest chore of the year out of the way first, shall we?  During my time as a writing instructor, I have had students from all over the place.  Most of my teaching work has involved students in the degree programs at Idaho State and the University of Idaho, but I also teach students at the Intensive English Institute who come to this country with another first language of origin.  The thing is, it doesn’t matter where students are from—the most perplexing punctuation mark is the same across the board: the humble but puzzling semicolon.

So what is that thing anyway?  What does it have to do with lists?  How does it relate to a regular colon?  Is it just a comma with a little hat made out of a period?

Well, here’s the thing.  The semicolon is both simpler and more useful than you might think.  Using them correctly can make your writing much more efficient, and it also makes reading technical documents much easier.

A semicolon serves one primary purpose—to connect two related sentences together.  Ok, technically the things they connect are called independent clauses, but that’s really what sentences are made of.  A sentence is composed of a subject (a who or what) and a verb (an action that the who or what performs).  Any such grouping is an independent clause, which becomes a sentence when you put a period, question mark, or exclamation point at the end.  

If you want to link two complete independent clauses together, though, a semicolon is that way to do it.  A set of sentences might read: “The cat was tired.  It slept.”  In the example, “cat” and “it” are subjects, and “was” and “slept” are verbs.  Together, they create two separate independent clauses.  To increase readability, and potentially save a little space, a semicolon can bridge the two clauses just fine, e.g.: “The cat was tired; it slept.”  A semicolon usually operates like the example, where the two independent clauses are clearly related to one another.  

And that’s almost all there is to it.  The other thing to be aware of is that semicolons have a lower-tech cousin.  Or maybe the right metaphor is that there is a more jury-rigged way to connect sentences that most people use instinctively.  Words like “and” “but” “for” and “so” are called conjunctions, because they, well, conjoin things.  A semicolon can be replaced by a conjunction along with a comma.  To reuse our cat example: “The cat was tired, and it slept.”  

So the next time you see one, don’t be alarmed; semicolons are not the enemy!


Word of the Week: Novel

The word “novel” most likely invokes the image of a thick book sitting around somewhere—a nightstand, a beach chair, an airplane seatback.  And that, along with the word “novelty” is probably how it’s most often encountered.  It’s an appropriate word for this time of year, as it is derived from the latin word “novus,” which means “new.”  From that original use, there are really two main paths that the word has followed.  The term “novel” was often used to describe the English writing that began to develop in the eighteenth century.  As is still the case, books for the masses tended to come in the form of stories of romance, crime, adventure, and the supernatural, or what was term “gothic.”  Horace Walpole is generally considered the father of the genre, with his book “The Castle of Otranto,” a wild ride featuring a giant floating helmet and a statue of the Virgin Mary with a nose bleed.  

Again like today, the wilder and more ridiculous the stories were, the better they sold.  For every Jane Eyre or House of the Seven Gables, there are roughly an infinity of throw away books about haunted this and that or holdovers from the Spanish Inquisition or vampires up to no good.  

As the stories sought greater and greater levels of outlandishness to compete in a crowded market, they began to be referred to a “novels” in the condescending sense of things that are new for newness sake alone.  In other words, a “fad” of sorts.

The other main path for our original word “novus” is the word “news”.  News is something of a synecdoche (that’s a free bonus word), which is a word that refers to a larger whole by one piece of it.  “News” of course refers to “things that are new” just like “novel” does, but with a historically greater sense of its own importance.  

It’s interesting to note that over time, the “seriousness” of the word “novel” has only increased, while we all know the widespread reputation of the word “news.”  That’s the way language works, though; over time, the reference points or social context can shift how we see and understand words within that language.  There are many examples, and we’ll look at a few next time! 

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