I get a lot of people coming to this blog through Google and other search engines in order to find out how to properly use the lowly semicolon. They don’t find much information since this is not a grammar and punctuation blog. However, I’ve been meaning for some time to post a simple guide to the use of the semicolon for all those inquiring minds who want to know. Since I couldn’t write anything better than Mr. Strunk has already written, here’s his entry on the use of the semicolon:

Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Stevenson’s romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures.
It is nearly half past five; we cannot reach town before dark.

It is of course equally correct to write the above as two sentences each, replacing the semicolons by periods.

Stevenson’s romances are entertaining. They are full of exciting adventures.
It is nearly half past five. We cannot reach town before dark.
f a conjunction is inserted, the proper mark is a comma (Rule 4).

Stevenson’s romances are entertaining, for they are full of exciting adventures.
It is nearly half past five, and we cannot reach town before dark.

Note that if the second clause is preceded by an adverb, such as accordingly, besides, so, then, therefore, or thus, and not by a conjunction, the semicolon is still required.

I had never been in the place before; so I had difficulty in finding my way about.

In general, however, it is best, in writing, to avoid using so in this manner; there is danger that the writer who uses it at all may use it too often. A simple correction, usually serviceable, is to omit the word so, and begin the first clause with as:

As I had never been in the place before, I had difficulty in finding my way about.

If the clauses are very short, and are alike in form, a comma is usually permissible:

Man proposes, God disposes.
The gate swung apart, the bridge fell, the portcullis was drawn up.

For more information on Elementary Rules of (English) Usage, William Strunk’s little book, Elements of Style is available online here.

I hope you found this public service announcement to be helpful.

Albert Camus, existentialist author of The Plague, The Stranger, and The Fall, died in a car accident on January 4, 1960 in Sens, Algeria.
I had not heard this story of Camus’s conversations with Methodist minister Howard Mumma until we read about it today in our new book, One Year Book of Christian History by Michael and Sharon Rusten.

According to Camus:

We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

He does seem to have struggled, alternating between hope and despair. Maybe he finally found hope.

Mark Steyn writes:

The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70% of them are “white” or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.

This quote is only a a few sentences from a much longer piece in which Steyn comments on the collapse of birthrates in Western countries and impending death of Western civilization. If you think he’s exaggerating, read his column. Babies are our most valuable natural resource.

The short summary of this book sounds like the beginning of a bad joke:

What do you get get when you cross a Pulitzer-prize winning Jewish journalist from Connecticut with a bunch of hardcore Virginia Confederate reenactors?

You get a lot of weirdness, to start with. (Quote from the front of the book: “Southerners are very strange about that war.”–Shelby Foote) I kept shaking my head while reading this book and muttering, “He’s exaggerating. Nobody’s that obsessed.” Do you believe that there are people who spend all their weekends reenacting the battles of the Civil War? That some of the guys obsess about their weight because they want to look like starving Confederate soldiers? That there are people who commemorate the anniversary of the hanging of Henry Wirz, commander of Andersonville prison, and celebrate him as a hero of the South? That the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond is sixty-one feet high? That this quote from the book is for real?

. . . their passion for the War had crowded out everything else, including church.
“We were raised Methodists,” Sue said. “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.”
“War is hell,” Ed deadpanned. “And it just might send us there.”
But Sue didn’t worry about the afterlife. In fact she looked forward to it. “The neatest thing about living is that I can die and finally track down all those people I couldn’t find in the records.” She pointed at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Either way, it’ll be heaven just to get that information.”

I’ve lived in the South(west) all my life, and I haven’t met any of these people–although I do believe that the Civil War is still being fought, still at issue in many people’s minds and hearts. I have heard relatives correct others when someone called the War “the Civil War.” It’s the “War Between the States” or, more radically, “The War of Northern Aggression.” I have heard people talk about “those Yankees,” in fun, I hope. So I can believe that Tony Horowitz, in his tour through the Civl War states and battle sites found a subculture that is admirable (loyal and hospitable) in some ways and xenophobic (fearful and obsessive) in others. Horowitz himself is somewhat obsessed. He drew a huge mural of Pickett’s Charge on the wall of his attic as a child and spent hours poring through an old Civil War book with his father. The book is partly an attempt to understand his own affinity for all things Civil War, especially the Confederacy.

Another theme is the disappearance of many historic Civil War sites, overtaken by highways, office parks, and suburbs. Horowitz mourns the loss of these sites as he acknowledges its inevitability. He also gives readers a nostalgic picture of his visits to Antietam and Shiloh, battle fields that have been preserved and are cared for by the National Park Service.

Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who is quoted extensively in this book, says that the Civil War defined us. After reading Confederates in the Attic and thinking about its implications, I would say that War is still defining us. Will it ever be over?