"The semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." Others disagree.

[Kire]

Pause celebre
By Trevor Butterworth

The sea spat like a thug into the back garden; fitful clouds unleashed volley after volley of rain; and all around the wind howled as if a ghostly cavalry charge had borne down upon Termon House, an 18th-century architectural curiosity perched above a narrow, stone-wracked beach. It was New Year’s Eve on the turbulent coast of Donegal, and inside the kitchen of this lonely guesthouse, the gaggle of celebrants - refugees from the forced gaiety of Dublin and London - were girding themselves for literary battle. Sort of.

”You’re kidding,” said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation’s axis of evil. Or at least many of them do. “But I like semicolons,” she protested, “they allow a writer to go further.” Trevor McGuinness, a business manager, was equally incredulous. “Hazlitt,” he said, smacking the table indignantly, “look at Hazlitt!” Had midnight been closer and the bottle emptier, we might have taken him literally; but the point still floated within the grasp of sober minds: if so great a prose stylist as William Hazlitt had embraced the semicolon, then surely we could too?

Now, you may be thinking of a more pertinent question: why, of all the possible topics that might have stirred passions on New Year’s Eve, the semicolon? But why not? Punctuation is hot: Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots Leaves is to this decade what The Joy of Sex was to the 1970s - a guide for those of us fumbling over what should come naturally. And we fumblers are legion. In America, the book occupied a place on The New York Times top-10 bestseller list for 38 weeks, selling more than 1.2 million copies.

What accounts for this sudden surge in punctophilia? Perhaps the general loss of old-school learning - memorised historical dates, multiplication tables, the odd stanza or sonnet - has sent a frisson of intellectual status anxiety through the newly middle-aged middle classes. And what could be more unnerving than a slipshod grasp of punctuation?

More: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0ca549d2-25a9-11da-a4a7-00000e2511c8.html

[Lautremont]

1. I like semicolons,

but am the first to note when writers use them where they should be using colons. It's easy: just replace the punctuation with an "and so" or a "therefore," and you know what you should be using.

[pnorman]

3. I use them myself fairly often.

I distinguish between comma and semi-colon by "instinct", and perhaps not always correctly. But after seeing this, I'll do some studying on comma, semi-colon, and colon, via Google.

pnorman

[Igel]

2. Punctuation forms a perfectly sound semiotic system, like

any other.

Semicolons are an integral part of it. You can make do without them, but only at the expense of enlarging the domain of other symbols.

I like them.

Now if I could just get people to accept the idea that a comma can follow an m-dash.

[Hand]

4. Ah, the mighty semicolon!

It's like the queen in chess--unlimited versatility, but use it right or you can get into a passel of trouble!
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