1112. This week, we look at why you can safely ignore Kurt Vonnegut’s famous advice about ignoring semicolons. We also look at why taking punctuation advice from fiction writers may not be a good idea for business writing. Then, we look at how major life events, not age, change how you speak as you get older.
1112. This week, we look at why you can safely ignore Kurt Vonnegut’s famous advice about ignoring semicolons. We also look at why taking punctuation advice from fiction writers may not be a good idea for business writing. Then, we look at how major life events, not age, change how you speak as you get older.
The age segment was by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we'll talk about Kurt Vonnegut and the semicolon, and then we'll talk about what age has to do with your writing.
by Mignon Fogarty
For many writers, picking a favorite punctuation mark is a bit like picking a favorite child. All of them can move you to awe with their power and finesse, and all of them can frustrate and disappoint you with their weaknesses. But don’t you dare speak ill of them. Any of them.
That’s why I was surprised when I first saw Kurt Vonnegut throwing shade at the semicolon. His quotation is usually presented in isolation, like this:
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Aside from the puzzling and seemingly offensive putdown of “transvestite hermaphrodites” and my memories of being taught about semicolons in grade school rather than college, I couldn’t imagine that any talented writer would so universally dismiss an entire punctuation mark.
Since I'm not one to take things at face value, I went searching and quickly found that the Vonnegut quotation — which I so often see offered with a giddy air of insider superiority — is taken out of context. Here’s the next line:
And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding.
The way he delivers the line, it’s still not clear whether he’s saying he was kidding or simply saying that he’ll warn us in the future when he is kidding, but at the least, it casts doubt on his meaning. A further reading of the essay casts more significant doubt because he goes on to disparage indigenous storytellers:
I started going to the library in search of reports about ethnographers, preachers, and explorers — those imperialists — to find what sorts of stories they’d collected from primitive people. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people — they’re so stupid.
And then he went on to disparage Shakespeare:
Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho [a tribe of Native Americans].
At this point, it should be clear that it is probably a good idea to take any advice in Vonnegut’s essay with a grain of salt — or at least not to take it literally. He seems like he’s actively trying to be contrary and upset people. And he ends any lingering doubt when he uses a semicolon later in the essay and then writes,
And there, I’ve just used a semicolon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
So it goes.
Vonnegut’s novels aren’t dripping with semicolons, but semicolons aren’t absent either, and he even uses them when he could have used something else. Here’s an example from page 15 of "Cat’s Cradle." In it, Vonnegut uses a semicolon in a way that isn’t considered standard: he uses one to separate two main clauses joined by a conjunction — a place where a writer would normally use a comma. Here’s the sentence:
Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb.
The first semicolon there makes sense because it separates two bare main clauses, but the second one (before "and Father was going to work on the atom bomb"), would usually be a comma.
Semicolon frequency is more a matter of style than rules. Vonnegut favored a simple writing style and short sentences, which limits the need for semicolons. The same is true of Frank McCourt. Semicolons are hard to find in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, "Angela’s Ashes," for example.
Other notable authors use more semicolons.
The second sentence of "The Luminaries" (winner of the Man Booker Prize) by Eleanor Catton is a beastly 127 words, and it contains a semicolon. They’re easy to find throughout the book. Here’s a shorter example that uses the semicolon for one of its standard purposes: to join independent clauses:
He was near trembling with fatigue; he was carrying a leaden weight of terror in his gut; he felt shadowed, even dogged; he was filled with dread.
Flipping through my bookshelf, I had no trouble finding semicolons in "Foucault’s Pendulum" (by Umberto Eco) and "Neuromancer" (by William Gibson) and found they were quite common in "The Goldfinch" (by Donna Tartt) and "Pride and Prejudice" (by Jane Austen).
Semicolons were also much more popular in the 1800s, and "Moby-Dick" (by Herman Melville, published in 1851) is absolutely littered with them, clocking in at almost 8.3 semicolons per page.
So the next time someone quotes Vonnegut to you about semicolons, now you know that you can safely ignore the advice, but in the bigger picture, going through these literary examples of semicolons made me realize that it may not be a good idea for non-fiction writers to take punctuation advice from those who are fiction writers, no matter how successful or brilliant those fiction writers may be.
Creative writing often eschews the kind of clear and concise prose that is the workhorse of effective nonfiction and business writing. Semicolons usually make their home in long sentences, and short sentences usually work well in business. If you have a 120-word sentence in an e-mail message, job description, or annual report, you should be thinking about how to simplify it or break it up — not thinking about where you should put the semicolon and hoping you’ll win a literary prize or be as eloquent as Umberto Eco or Jane Austen.
Although it’s not as dramatic or creative as Vonnegut’s line, my more realistic advice is “Don't use a lot of semicolons at the office.”
I wrote this segment and it originally appeared in "Office Pro" magazine.
by Valerie Fridland
You can feel your age in a lot of obvious ways — like wrinkles, slower 5K times, and less interest in staying out ‘til dawn — but how age affects the way we use language is a little less clear.
Sure, we often blame teens for the language changes that annoy us — like vocal fry, using "like" all the time, and even changes in how we pronounce things (like saying “di'nt” for “didn't”) — and we might also have a sense of someone being older based on the words they use (like when grandpa tells us, “That’s swell!”), but what is it about aging that makes us change the way we speak?
Well, it turns out that age alone isn't what changes you. Instead, it's the major life changes and new experiences that we go through — often at similar ages — that seem to change how we use language.
For example, several studies have shown that linguistic shifts accompany major life events like the transition from high school into college or becoming a parent. In other words, instead of just being a specific age, going through certain transformational life experiences is a big part of what causes changes in behavior — including linguistic ones — that we often attribute to being chronologically a certain age.
Of course, biological maturation, like what happens when we go through puberty, does affect language: the type of voice that we recognize as sounding like a child versus one that is more adult-like happens around age 12 when our hormones shift. But social factors also play a big role in the way our language continues to change all through life. Just think about the language that flows through the hallways of high schools. Slang and non-standard usage are powerful tools teens use to signal what's cool and to set themselves apart from those unhip parents.
In her study on the force of bers' linguistic norms in a Michigan high school, linguist Penny Eckert discovered that being part of the so-called “jocks” or the “burn-outs” was a good predictor of whether kids had picked up local vowel changes that were affecting the Detroit area. Kids associated with the burn-outs were much more likely to use these newer pronunciations, like saying “fawn” for “fun,” because they tended to have a stronger connection to urban Detroit and more close-knit local ties. The jocks, on the other hand, often had plans to go away for college or had more diffuse social networks. So, while these kids were chronologically the same age, what motivated their linguistic choices were their social experiences, backgrounds, and activities.
Most linguists tend to assume that once someone hits early adulthood, their dialect “fossilizes” or doesn’t change much from the 18- or 20-year-old pattern. But, while it's true that certain things — like picking up the complex sound patterns of a new dialect or language — are much less likely after adulthood, people do still change other things about the way they speak, like using new words, shifting toward more standard speech, or picking up a new pronunciation of a word or two (like saying “day-ta” instead of “daa-ta” when kicking it with other “day-ta” speakers).
In research studying how major life events like attending college, getting your first job, or retiring affect people’s language use, linguists have found that people do tend to change the way they speak in noticeable ways. For example, students entering college shift from the more colloquial and informal speech of high school to a more standard and formal way of speaking. Similar trends are found for people entering professional workplaces, where social and economic pressures motivate people to conform to mainstream or standard English.
In a fascinating turn, though, when people retire, they often do just the opposite! They start using their local dialects more or start using more informal or less standard language than they used when they were working. It could be that they need to shift their behaviors and thinking away from their work identity and refocus on their at-home identity. Or maybe they're hanging out with different people once they retire — and their activities now revolve around fun, solidarity, and community instead of the professional interactions of their working past.
One 2025 study by researchers at the University of Salzburg looked at how people perceived major life events like these as affecting their language use and attitudes by asking people to recall such an event and its influence on their use of either Austrian Standard German or a local Bavarian dialect. They found that 80% of their respondents noticed changes in how they spoke that they linked to major life events, like a first job or graduation, but also to personal events like getting married, having a baby, or moving to a new place. Like earlier studies that tracked real speech changes, this one found that people said they spoke more formally in new jobs or schools, but that personal events – and retiring – often led them to use more of their local dialect again.
One of the big takeaways was that people believed that, over their lifespan, they became more accommodating to others in the way they spoke and more positive toward all varieties — becoming more similar in speech style to those they spent a lot of time with, either in institutional contexts or new social ones.
Interestingly, these researchers found that a lot of these major life events were tied to specific ages — most people tend to go to high school, graduate, get married, have children, and retire at similar ages. So our feeling that “young” people speak one way and older people speak another way probably isn't really about our actual age as much as it is about how we happen to have these major life events around the same time. In short, it's these big life experiences that make the age meaningful, rather than the other way around. I’d say that’s pretty swell.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
References
Bowie, David & Yaeger-Dror, Malcah (2015). Language change in real time. In P. Honeybone & J. Salmons
(Eds.), Handbook of Historical Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 603–618.
Buchstaller, I. (2015). Exploring linguistic malleability across the life span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use. Language in Society, 44(4):457-496.
Eckert, P. (1988). Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change. Language in Society, 17(2), 183–207.
Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. Teachers College Press.
Wagner, S.E. (2012), Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6: 371-382.
Wirtz MA, Pickl S. (2025). Major life events as drivers of perceived linguistic change across adulthood. Language Variation and Change, 37(1):87-110.
Finally, I have a familect story from Christy:
Hi there, my name is Christy, and I have kind of a friend-elect. Here's the story. I went to the 24-hour Dunkin' Donuts. I like chocolate cake donuts, and there weren't any on display, so I asked the cashier if she had any. She got her wax paper, picked up a puffed white donut with chocolate frosting. I said, "I'm sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. The donut itself is chocolate and it's cake. She put the donut back as her manager came up. I asked, “Do you have any chocolate cake donuts? You know, the donut is chocolate and it's cake.” I made a donut shape with my hands. He got his wax paper, picked up the same donut. I said, “No, no, maybe I'm not being clear. The donut itself is chocolate and it's cake. It's not puffed.” They just gave me a blank look and then left without any donut at all. Among my friends, when someone is not understanding you, we'll say, “No, the donut is chocolate.” I hope you'll be able to use that on your show. Thanks.
Thanks, Christy. My heart sank for you when you left without a donut.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from a nice, quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
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And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip a day book, "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.