Semi-colon Pedantry, Grammar Nazism and the US Election
December 24 2020: It will make sense by the end, trust me.
Over Christmas Eve breakfast, my family engaged in a typically overwrought, pseudo-intellectual discussion about the nature of language.
The central question to be debated: is language constrained by a set of clear and immovable laws and conventions, or is it an evolving cultural artefact subject to the whims and desires of the public?
It began, as many heated discussions about language do, with semi-colons. After some wishy washy back and forth, I was — as a recovering but clearly still relapsing smug academic — forced to intervene and put my foot down.
No, you cannot use semi-colons as a substitute for commas, you uncultured swine: “My dad makes excellent coffee; as he has had much time to practice”.
You may use a semi-colon to link together two related but ultimately independent statements that could be otherwise be separated by a full stop: “My dad makes excellent coffee; he has had much time to practice”.
No, you cannot use semi-colons to introduce a list of examples to illustrate the previous statement, you linguistical philistine: “There are a few reasons my dad makes excellent coffee; he has had much time to practice, and he has an indulgently expensive coffee machine”.
You may use a semi-colon to separate individual examples in a list when one of those examples requires the use of commas to properly articulate: “My dad makes excellent coffee for several reasons: he has had much time to practice; he has an indulgently expensive coffee machine; he is, and I say this with love, an insufferable wanker”.
My dad, not to be outdone, took the opportunity to reiterate his pet peeve: people using ‘less than’ instead of ‘fewer than’. Remember that scene from Game of Thrones? Yep, he is one of those people.
What does semi-colon pedantry and grammar nazism have to do with what is going on in America at the moment? Let me try and explain.
Many people seem to be under the impression that America is a Democracy. It sounds nice, and it might seem like that on the surface, but try to tell any conservative this and they will quickly and probably savagely rebut you: America is not a Democracy, it is a Constitutional Republic.
I will readily admit that this distinction only dawned on me very recently. But since it has, the whole election debacle that is currently playing out has started to make more sense. It makes sense why Donald Trump, his team, and so many of his most ardent supporters remain so completely assured that they will overturn the currently accepted election result and usher in 4 more years of Orange-tinted (tainted?) glory.
Why are they so confident, if we remove the possibility of acute delusion? It is because they are not playing by the rules of Democracy, they are playing by the rules of the Constitution. And according to the strict rules of the Constitution, Trump still has multiple paths to victory.
To be clear, I am not supporting or endorsing these paths to victory. I will also leave my own thoughts on whether or not voter fraud impacted the result of the election out of this for now. I’m just hoping to pass on what I am seeing, hopefully accurately for the most part.
We have, most obviously, the courts. A State court may uphold one of the numerous active cases alleging legislators illegally changed voting laws against state Constitutions, decertifying the electoral votes of that state. Alternatively, SCOTUS itself may decide to overturn the results of the entire election if they view the actions of a particular state as unconstitutional (based on the assertion, which you have probably seen at least one Trump supporter shout through caps locks, that fraud vitiates everything). Such an attempt was made in the now infamous Texas lawsuit, where numerous red states combined to challenge the changes to voting procedures made by several swing states.
We also have the state legislators, who can potentially overturn the certification of their State’s voting by Governors. We also have both the House and the Senate, but more likely the Senate, who on January 6th can object to and reject the electors sent from a state whose certification process they perceive as invalid.
We also have, and this might be worthy of the biggest trigger warning for liberals, Veep Mike Pence himself — who I’m convinced is a clone created to represent the ultimate caricature of a conservative white Christian man. Due to the powers bestowed upon him as Vice President, Pence (apparently) has the ability to reject the electors from any states who he believes have acted unlawfully. Such as event, as well as many of the previous scenarios, would trigger a Contingent Election that would almost certainly result in a Trump victory.
I can’t even hope to do justice to the intricacies of the arguments that are being put forward for each of these paths to victory. I would suggest blog posts here and here if you feel the need to dive further into the optimistic thinking of Trump supporters.
While this optimism has been widely mocked and ridiculed in the month or so after the election, it would be a brave person to discount it completely. With claims of fraud spreading like wildfire on the socials (see for example this database compiling the alleged evidence in every state), and with public sentiment seemingly shifting by the day in this direction, one should not discount how significantly the discourse may shift between now and January 6th.
In a former life, I supervised undergraduate Urban Planning students undertaking their Honours Dissertations.
Many were clearly starting to take themselves seriously as writers, and combined with a healthy ego were prone to taking certain unforgivable liberties with their use of semi-colons. Needless to say, I was not having it.
Students, of course, have every right to use whatever language conventions they like in their own lives. They might choose to believe that the conventions they choose to use are in fact the correct conventions: ever shifting, ever subjective (we do teach Marxism as a planning theory after all). In the context of their own lives and their own realities they might be right.
But sometimes one’s own reality collides with another opposing reality, such as when it comes time for their dissertations — replete with creative use of semi-colons and quite possibly multiple instances of less instead of fewer — to be examined against a set of established, fixed conventions.
In our perhaps slightly tortured analogy, our punctuation and grammar-liberal students are our democracy-believing, also likely liberal Biden supporters (or hard left Biden haters, who are licking their lips at 4 years of cheap shots at the progressive establishment). We might also consider them to be the Governors, elected officials and legislators in individual States, who saw fit to rush through arguably unconstitutional changes to voting procedures under the guise of the pandemic. While seemingly reasonable in their current context — perhaps not unlike a creatively placed semi-colon that just feels appropriate— it should be remembered that Covid was not a thing when election-governing documents were drawn up.
It is these documents that represent our dissertation marking guide, namely the Constitution and related legal documents such as the Electoral Count Act, with the ruthless dissertation examiner being those who are tasked with interpreting and upholding these documents.
Our students may believe that Democracy has been practiced, that the electoral college has voted, and that this whole thing is done and dusted. But this isn’t how a Constitutional Republic operates.
Which way will the examiners go? As someone who has given many a flighty undergraduate student a reality check, not to mention as someone with a considerable amount of money riding on the outcome, I am undoubtably biased towards whose reality is likely to end up coming out on top in this election.
In less — sorry, fewer — words: we are about to find out if the upholders of the United States Constitution are as ruthless about semi-colon pedantry as I am.