It came to be used for a pause intermediate between a comma and a period.īut exactly what kind of pause? There are many kinds, and you can't reliably go by length. That year, an Italian printer named Aldus Manutius added the semicolon to a Roman typeface. And that was that until the year Columbus reached Jamaica, 1494. Let's briefly review the history of semicolons. We may think of semicolons as professorial, but what if they're really the textual equivalent of "uptalk"? How can you take seriously a punctuation mark that's like a green light and a red light showing together? The semicolon is not really about taking yourself deadly seriously, but rather about leading the reader along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy there is more to come to read on it will get clearer. The period tells you that that is that if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. But let's assume that displaying the hallmarks of more complex thought does suggest that you've been to college.
I'm sure much of the "tl dr" crowd haven't been to college either. I used semicolons before I went to college, and I know I'm not the only one. I don't agree with Vonnegut's apparently negative attitude toward transvestite hermaphrodites. All they do is show you've been to college." They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. Vonnegut is widely quoted maligning the punctuation mark: "Do not use semicolons. 'Real' writing is butch and cinematic, so emphatic and declarative that it has no need of these rest stops or hinges between phrases."Īnd then there's Kurt Vonnegut, an author whose opinions carry well-deserved weight. Here's The Washington Post's Bill Walsh: "The semicolon is an ugly bastard, and I try to avoid it." And Vanity Fair's James Wolcott: "The semicolon adds a note of formality, and informality has been all the rage for decades. And it's a very useful little mark when used well. Which is in itself odd you see, the rules for its use are breathtakingly simple. But I suspect that no punctuation mark is more threatening or despised than the semicolon. The semicolon is not the most abused punctuation mark that prize goes to the apostrophe. First, it may be the only initialism ever in common use - common colloquial use, yet - to include a semicolon.
Among the latest shocking news in the world of lexicography is that "tl dr" has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online.