trends in the Western world that privileged natural-scientific knowledge above other types of study; and in responding to those pressures, grammarians devised systems of punctuation that fitted comfortably with the ideals and the formats employed in science textbooks. Where had a century of rules, of grammars labelled ‘true’ and ‘real’ and ‘improved’, of grammars sidling up to natural science – where had all this got the generations of English speakers who had grown up immersed in books devoted to these principles? Into trouble, that’s where, according to commentators. ‘Where is the man that can tell why a comma is inserted instead of a semicolon; a semicolon, instead of a period [full stop]; a colon, instead of a period?’ asked an 1899 American newspaper editorial. ‘And yet, the science of punctuation is almost as definite as the science of mathematics, and, with few exceptions, a reason can be given for every mark inserted.’ The rules were definitive, and yet their application varied wildly, and this divergence was apt to haunt a person all his or her life. As the Boston Daily Globe sombrely intoned:
From childhood’s earliest hour, or from that early hour in which one graduates from pothooks and hangers, and his wavering hand begins to form scraggly letters, those mysterious little hieroglyphics that must be placed somewhere in every sentence confront him, and confuse him, and all through his natural life get him in trouble. Then, perhaps, after death his heirs will call each other names and invoke the courts of law because he were indiscreet enough to use a comma where he should have put a semicolon.
The Globe had good reason to raise the spectre of a punctuation-related legal battle; the new rule-based approach to punctuation had already begun to trouble the court system. Now it was not just the letter of the law but the punctuation separating those letters that judges and juries had to negotiate. Another commentator, for the Indianapolis Journal, concurred: citing four specific instances in which the semicolon had ‘made trouble in the laws’ by creating ambiguity in statutes, the author ascribed this trouble to ‘inability to fix the function of the semicolon’. Old grammar books had given the rules of punctuation in terms of pauses, and ‘if those who have been writing rules for punctuating compositions had stopped there, we would not have had all this trouble, but these teachers have been going on making new rules for years until no one can undertake to follow them, but each punctuates according to his pleasure, rather than his familiarity with the rules’. Finding the rules unhelpful, the public had run screaming in the opposite direction, punctuating willy-nilly. Therefore, the commentator opined, either the court system should write a legal treatise to define punctuation marks once and for all, or it should resolve to ignore punctuation altogether in its rulings.
But unbeknownst to the commentator, the American court system had already given the latter strategy a try, relying on old British case law for precedent. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had issued a ruling saying that punctuation had no part in statutes. This attempt to assert that Justice ought to extend her blindness to commas and semicolons was over-optimistic, and didn’t obviate any of the interpretive problems with which the law had to contend. Any remaining hope that the law could somehow escape the challenges posed by punctuation went out the window when a semicolon set about wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor in a dramatic Massachusetts court case that caused six years of controversy in courtrooms, in legislative debates, and in the streets.
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