A study found that semicolons are in steep decline; I remain loyal.
Its dectractors can be quite virulent. It is sometimes taken as a sign of affected elitism. Adrian Mole, the pretentious schoolboy protagonist of Sue Townsend's popular novels, says snobbishly of Barry Kent, the skinhead bully at his school: "He wouldn't know what a semicolon was if it fell into his beer." Kurt Vonnegut (whose novels are not entirely free of semicolons) said semicolons represented "absolutely nothing" and using them just showed that you "went to college".
The prevailing emdash—a shibboleth of the millenial writer, especially with a casual exclamation mark!—is a poor replacement.
I get the antipathy to semicolons, which tend to make writing more complicated and ideas harder to unravel. But one hatred tends to speak for another:
American journalist James Kilpatrick denounced the semicolon "girly", "odious", and the "most pusillanimous, sissified utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented".
Even Cormac McCarthy used semicolons, if rarely. Roslyn Petelin, writing professor at the University of Queensland, explains what they're good for.
1) it separates independent clauses, but establishes a relation between them. It suggests that the statements are too closely connected to stand as separate sentences. For example: "Speech is silver; silence is golden."
2) it can be used to clarify a complicated list. For example: "Remember to check your grammar, especially agreement of subjects and verbs; your spelling, especially of tricky words such as 'liaison'; and your punctuation, especially your use of the apostrophe."
The Financial Times sides with the squiggle: "Semicolons bring the drama; that's why I love them."
Forget the haters and doubters; this under-appreciated punctuation mark is a writer's friend, beloved of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The semicolon — a comma with a full stop for a hat, and sometimes called a super-comma — can sashay into prose and transform it in a way that a full stop, comma or even a dash cannot.
I'd like to take this opportunity to unveil the hypercolon.
What do you use a hypercolon for? To attribute asides; for intrusive thoughts; to introduce lists of things that don't exist; inline footnotes; and to signify inter-process communications in literary contexts.
