A purist is someone who, particularly in matters of language and art, insists on the rules, pressing that they be always observed and always obeyed, even at the expense of being pedantic. The purist and the pedant and the perfectionist forget, however, that our human experience, what we are and what we contrive, is all a combination of permanency and change. Rules keep things what they are for a time, and wisdom tells us how far in a given situation we may tend away from them. The two partner with each other, for rules alone are sterile and wisdom alone cannot be wise.
Purism and pedantry can wreak havoc in language study. I recently came across, for example, an explanation like this in a widely used guidebook for high school students preparing for college entrance exams:
Use a semicolon to join independent clauses when one of the clauses has punctuation of its own and is introduced by a coordinating conjunction: I ordered a new coat online last week; but it was delivered to an address in Tampa, Florida.
A purist is, by definition, purely correct, and we cannot say that there is anything technically incorrect about this explanation. The rule is certainly right, but the example illustrates how one can be overly correct, and that runs the risk of misguiding students who may not yet realize that grammar is to work in complement with both logic and rhetoric to replicate the unimaginably complex reality we call our being alive. Being overly correct puts too much weight on the logical, probably out of an abundance of caution not to step outside the grammatically legal lines. What lies beyond those lines, however, is where life sports, and knowing how to join in requires not positivistic law, but a more subtle discernment of the nuances amidst all the dash and circumstance.
The question at issue in this example involves what is called internal punctuation. The illustrative sentence given is compound, with two independent clauses. These are laminated with the coordinating conjunction but, and the second one includes a comma to separate a city and state. Now this particular use of a comma is strictly formal; it represents a formatting instruction given by most manuals of style simply to separate isolated data and make the reading easier. It has a logical, almost mechanical function, not a rhetorical one, and so while technically correct, the sentence could also be acceptably punctuated with only a comma separating the two independent clauses: I ordered a new coat online last week, but it was delivered to an address in Tampa, Florida.
Why? Because to maintain that internal punctuation always necessitates a semicolon between independent clauses, if taken absolutely as this illustration implies, can dull our perception in reading weightier sentences where such a rule is really in order. Here, for example, is a grammatically complex and analytically difficult sentence by the writer Josef Pieper, from his Belief and Faith, discussing the difference between believing something and believing someone:
A judge listening to the interrogation of members of a gang charged with some crime may very well be convinced that certain items in their statements are true; but the reason he thinks them true is not that he trusts the witnesses, that he assents to the witnesses as persons.
In this sentence, the comma in the second clause does not merely separate pieces of data, but it introduces an entire clause meant to advance the assertion of the previous clause: the subject, the judge, has come to a conclusion not because he trusts the witnesses and not because he assents to what they say as persons. The sentence does not give any reason why the judge did come to the conclusion he did, because that is irrelevant to the point Pieper is making: truth is truth, no matter who is saying it. That is subtle, and Pieper no doubt felt it necessary to reinforce the idea (a rhetorical choice) with two clauses. This results in a hefty verbal structure for the reader to comprehend, and that is exactly when and why a semicolon is necessary, as the rule says, before an independent clause with internal punctuation of its own. Here, a comma instead of a semicolon would only have added to the difficulty in sorting out the writer’s massy assertion. Such weightiness, with an internal comma separating an appositive clause, is a far cry from a comma separating the name of city from its state.
The letter of the law, legal or grammatical, is never enough. The classical world understood that the making of art should follow life’s lead, meaning not necessarily the social conventions of any particular society, but life in the way we can see it acting naturally in the most general of ways: there is permanency and change, definition and actuality. How to wend our way through those clashing rocks is the conscientious work of any artist, and in the practical decisions of composing and punctuating sentences, that means comprehending the reasons behind the rules, and realizing when such reasons are existent and when they are not. In the end, this keenness makes for wisdom, the knowing of just what to do just when.
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