One for Jeremy
Sex and the semicolon at the Boston Globe.
Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing "a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7."
You'd think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. [...]
I am unashamedly a fan of the poor, under-utilised semicolon -- mostly just because I think it looks cool.
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
Celebrating the Semicolon
Awesome little story in the New York Times:
Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
by Sam Roberts
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual but Neil Neches, a writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted one on a placard anyway.
Sadly, the semicolon is still going the way of the dodo...