When you start dating someone you will naturally want to know if he or she uses drugs.  It’s less likely you’ll want to know if he or she uses semicolons – unless you believe that the answer will lead to marriage. We can’t recall if it started that way for Virginia and Leonard Woolf or Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but we know from a recent wedding announcement in New York Times that that’s how it started for Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer.

“Both were blasting through the often less-than-literate listings of online dating sites,” writes Andrew L. Yarrow, “when Mr. Feifer’s e-mail message on OKCupid.com caught Ms. Miller’s eye for reasons less romantic than grammatical. ‘He used a semicolon correctly; that was reason enough to get a drink with him,’ the 31-year-old author of Inheriting the Holy Land recalled.”

The rest is history, as you will see if you care to read details of their wedding announcement.

So, if you’re entering into a relationship and suspect your love object is scrutinizing your emails for solecisms, you might want to refresh your understanding of this subtle point of grammar.

Melissa Donovan in WritingForward.com has this to say about it:

#The semicolon establishes a close connection between two sentences or independent clauses.
#A semicolon can replace conjunctions and or but.
Semicolons indicate a stronger separation than a comma but weaker than a period.
#A semicolon is often used in lists to separate items when some of the items in listed subsets require commas.
#The semicolon is always followed by a lower case letter with proper nouns being the only exception (proper nouns are always capitalized).
#Semicolon use can be applied to separate two clauses or sentences that are saying the same thing in different ways.
#As with other punctuation marks that denote the end of a clause or sentence, there is no space between the semicolon and the word preceding it; there should be a single space after the semicolon.

Example:
#I love music; however, I haven’t played my own guitar in several years.
#I’m fascinated by names and their meanings; Melissa means honey bee.
#There’s nothing like the gentle drum of water hitting against the window pane; I love the rain.

So, lovers, remember this: when you email your beloved, pay heed to those semicolons; they could save your relationship.

Richard Curtis

Can a single typo or grammatical error spoil a book? Ann Patty, a distinguished editor for several big publishers and now a freelance editor, says absolutely. The latest offense is what professionals call a howler. Patty cites an incorrect use in the runaway bestseller Go the F*ck to Sleep.

The offensive line is: “The lambs have laid down with the sheep.”

It should of course be “lain”. Given the fact that confusion about the use of the verbs lie and lay is one of the commonest in the English-speaking world, the goof comes as no surprise. But what appalls Patty is that the editor didn’t catch it, an oversight eliciting this outburst: “The written word, when printed and bound, must be held to the highest standards. Editors, copy editors, and proofreaders, please clean up your act, do your job, and learn the f**king rules!”

It is dangerous to be too high-minded about such things, however, as was exemplified not long ago in the “Metropolitan Diary” feature of the New York Times:

Visiting an editor at Random House, I stepped into a crowded elevator and found myself pressed close to the control panel.

”Has everybody got their floors?” I asked.

After a moment’s silence, a young female voice from the rear said, ”His or her.”

”I beg your pardon?” I said.

”His or her. It’s ‘Has everybody got his or her floors?’ Your pronouns don’t agree.”

”And shouldn’t it be ‘his or her floor’, not ‘floors’?” a young man piped up. ”Each of us gets off at only one floor.”

”And wouldn’t it be better to say ‘Does everybody have?’ rather than ‘Has everybody got?’ ” a third voice chimed in.

I stood corrected — and red faced. But I was glad to know that good grammar is alive and well.

The unfortunate perpetrator of those gaffes was… yours truly.

Read Ann Patty’s rant in full: Learn the F**king Rules!

Richard Curtis