Martin Bandyke Under Covers for December 2019: Martin interviews Cecelia Watson, author of Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.
b"From the publisher:\\nThe semicolon --- Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care?\\n\\nIn Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples\\u2014from Milton\\u2019s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.\\u2019s \\u201cLetters from Birmingham Jail\\u201d to Raymond Chandler\\u2019s The Big Sleep\\u2014Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we\\u2019d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language.\\n\\nThrough her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don\\u2019t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.\\n\\nMartin's interview with Cecelia Watson was recorded on September 4, 2019."