Semi Colon

November 27, 2020 2:15 PM

There is a quote from I think a Turkish scholar, in the second world war. He was admonished for caring so much about the placement of a semi colon in the time of war, and he replied about the world depending on the well placed semi colon. Can someone remember the quote?
posted by PinkMoose to Writing & Language (2 answers total)

I think maybe it's Prof. Egon Schwelb (Crimes Against Humanity, Oxford University Press, 1946) though I'm having trouble with the exact quote and he was Czech. In 1945, a semicolon inserted into the definition of war crimes in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) threatened to halt the prosecution of captured Nazis until the ambiguous sentence was clarified. It was changed to a comma by the Berlin "Semi-Colon Protocol" of October 6, 1945. ["By introducing a comma instead of a semicolon after “war,” the Berlin Protocol of October 6, 1945, insured the limited scope of all crimes against humanity-limited, that is, to acts committed “in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal . . . .” See Schwelb, “Crimes against Humanity,” pp. 194-195."]

[Schwelb was legal counsel to the United Nations War Crimes Commission from 1945 to 1947, then served as deputy director of the division of human rights at the United Nations from 1947 to 1962. Dr. Jacob Robinson, born in Lithuania, founder of the Institute for Jewish Affairs, talked about the semi-colon issue in a Schwelb-edited document here; Robinson also reminded President Truman and his appointee Justice Jackson (chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg) about the 1919 Treaty of Sèvres at a critical point: "[T]hough that treaty never entered into effect, it purported to establish the legal basis for the prosecution of Turkish officials for 'crimes against the laws of humanity' as stated in the Preamble of the 1907 Hague Convention" -- Crimes against Humanity in International Law, M. Cherif Bassiouni.]
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:41 PM on November 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: This is an amazing answer, but i am not sure it is quite it--it's sort of like a qoute justifying spending a life doing small academic work when the world was burning, when hte interloucer was like, the world is burning because the small work isnt being done...
posted by PinkMoose at 6:36 PM on November 27, 2020