SOLILOQUY OF A SEMICOLON

soliloquy of a semicolon

sofia aguilar

It is my lot in life to be constantly misunderstood. A misused, mistakenly implemented, frequently abused mark made of a period for a head and a comma for a leg, this body of misshapen proportions. Perhaps that is one reason for your confusion. I am made of punctuation that already exists, the in-between of the very components that shape my entity. e other, of course, is that you consider me stando sh, unapproachable, hard to read and even harder from which to invoke speech. Unlike quotation marks, I prefer to keep my private business unspoken. To my frequent dismay, however, idle chatter spreads even among punctuation. People are surprised to hear that I am incompatible with the colon and that parentheses are my lovers more than friends.

But surprise is not the same as respect. From the moment of my invention, I have found myself incorrectly placed before incomplete clauses, dependent thoughts as though someone seeing a woman solely for her money (never mind her personality) or a child that is really an adult but has yet to move out of their par-

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ents’ house. Using me mistakenly happens most when you long to appear more educated than you actually are, than the average American (but unlike the average Brit, that’s low-hanging fruit). You shape your words to convince not only your reader but yourself that you alone are in tune with a language that evades even the most intelligent of scholars, fearing the comma be seen as too lowly or working-class.

On the other hand, many of you outright reject me, treat me with suspicion as a tool that can never commit to either half of its identity. I lack the ighty promiscuity of the comma*, the irritating indecisiveness of the backslash, the masculinity of Hemingway, Chandler, and King.

But strangely, I don’t mind. I’m not as vain as the ampersand or as pompous as the question and exclamation marks (in my opinion, the three are used far too easily and too o en). Nor am I desperate to be employed like brackets, braces, and chevrons (though I do sympathize with the asterisk even if—or perhaps because—it, like the at and number sign, is now being used online for reasons incomprehensible to me).

Instead, I lie in wait, hungry for the page, burning

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for my only two purposes, seeking lists with too many commas included and two complete clauses you wish to be valued the same; one day, I too will know what it is to be needed, understood.

*Courtesy of British columnist and my adversary Ben MacIntyre

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