709 - Surprise! The History of Semicolons Is Exciting.
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I talked with Cecelia Watson, author of the new book "Semicolon" about how grammar writers in the 1800s became fabulously wealthy, struggled to create rules, and had vicious arguments; and we talked about how researching the book changed her approach to teaching writing and a whole bunch more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi Cecilia, thanks for being here with me today. |
| 0:07.3 | Hi, Mignon. |
| 0:08.8 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:10.4 | I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so I'm thrilled. |
| 0:13.5 | Oh, wonderful. |
| 0:14.5 | Well, I am now a huge fan of your book, so I can't wait to hear more about it. |
| 0:20.4 | Right. |
| 0:21.4 | So first of all, you wrote a book called Semicolon, and it's about one punctuation mark. |
| 0:27.8 | So I'd love to hear when it occurred to you that you could write a whole book about |
| 0:32.5 | this one punctuation mark. |
| 0:34.7 | Well, I think I might have written a five volume set to be honest. |
| 0:41.8 | I spent so many years looking into the history of this one punctuation mark and chasing |
| 0:48.8 | down both the history of that mark, but also the rules that relate to it and all these |
| 0:54.7 | sort of socio-cultural phenomena that surround grammar rules. |
| 1:00.2 | And the deeper I went into it, the more I found myself transformed by that research, I |
| 1:08.2 | used to be super pedantic about grammar, I would say. |
| 1:12.6 | I mean, really a kind of rule-monger. |
| 1:16.1 | And I loved the rules. |
| 1:17.2 | I thought that they were ironclad. |
| 1:19.3 | I kept the Chicago manual style on my bedstand like it was the Bible. |
| 1:25.1 | And the more that I looked into the history of rules, the more I thought, actually, I have |
| 1:32.4 | completely the wrong idea about rules, about language. |
... |
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