One purpose of blogging, for me at least, is to improve my writing. There is plenty of room for this endeavour. A reader has told me that I have fallen into error. The Spanish Inquisition is still with us.
I like receiving comments here about posts but this time I was pleased that it came by e mail so that my humiliation was private; now I feel sufficiently composed to share it with you. Ingaret told me that I have been using a semicolon when a colon would not only do the trick but be correct. I have made a couple of corrections in Post On Post but earlier errors remain. Now all I have to fret about is whether it’s a semi-colon or a semicolon. Like Lady MacBeth I say, out, damned hyphen, out.
I was always a bit uneasy about the usage of colons and semicolons. Using a colon seemed to me, grammatically, to be pressing the nuclear button. Thanks to her criticism, I hope I have now got the hang of it; I think. Do you remember Jennifer’s Diary in Tatler and later Harpers & Queen? It was written for years by Betty Kenward. She started her column in the Second World War and retired in 1991. Her Daily Telegraph obituary appeared in 2001 and makes this comment:
Another feature of Betty Kenward’s copy was the idiosyncratic system of punctuation she developed, in particular her pointed use of the semi-colon and the comma. In lists of those who attended a party, the Royal Family and others of special importance would be cordoned off from the lowly with a semi-colon, and even in mid-sentence the Queen, received an honorary comma.
I must have picked up bad habits from her. Incidentally, she once reproved a young photographer for talking to her at a party: “my photographers never talk to me at parties”. To her chagrin the photographer (later to be Lord Snowdon) married Princess Margaret and Mrs Kenward spent an afternoon disconsolately kicking the wastepaper basket round her office muttering, “what a turn-up this is”. Thereafter, she referred in her column to “Princess Margaret and her husband”. Many of her eccentricities are described in her obituary which, although somewhat uncharitable, are highly amusing.
*Punkers is a nod to what punctuation would have been called on Test Match Special, in the old days.