tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6126042.post-1077317202272830972004-02-20T22:46:00.000Z2004-02-22T23:29:17.326Z Heartening news from San Francisco on Tuesday, where the decisive point in the first round of the legal row about same-sex marriages turned on a punctuation mark. "The way you've written this, it has a semi-colon where it should have the word 'or'," Superior Court Judge James Warren told conservatives who had drafted an application for a "cease and desist" order to stop the weddings of gay and lesbian couples. "I am not trying to be petty here," said the judge. "But it is a big deal." He refused to grant the order, saying: "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances." Like every working e-editor, Judge Warren obviously felt it was about time the world's overpaid illiterates were held to account for their pompous, careless drafting. The wording of the application tried to insist that the City of San Francisco should "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court." This inept and slack phrasing got what it deserved, though Judge Warren did miss a golden opportunity to point out that the "and/or" was just as bad and stupid as the controversial semi-colon. After all, if you cease to issue and solemnize, any possible "or" is already covered. But it was the sheer blank idiocy of tacking on that phrase "to show cause before this court", without any syntactical effort to link it to what came before, that caused the anti-gay case to fail. Judge Warren finally came up with the imaginative compromise of a non-binding cease and desist order, which will eventually be discussed at a compliance hearing on 29 March – by which time tens of thousands more couples will have been married. Far more importantly, he struck a resounding blow for the court's right to rule on what was in front of it, rather than what a bunch of blustering millionaire lawyers hoped they were saying. As we've mentioned before (see Punk Punctuation on the main <a href="http://www.e-edit.co.uk">e-editor.co.uk</a> Web site), you can manage very well without semi-colons in your life. There is almost no instance in which you actually need them. In the hands of an expert, they can produce fine and subtle effects. But we're not working with artists of this calibre most days. And, as the San Francisco court case shows, a lazy, ill-considered semi-colon in the wrong place can be a very expensive mistake. ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00882602151850785568noreply@blogger.com