On semicolons.

[randomness]

From the Financial Times, September 17, 2005, archived at the author's website:

Pause Celebre

Carlyle's sumptuous prose was rich with them; Evelyn Waugh's fluid reveries depended on them.
The semicolon can be as subtle as a breath - so why do Americans hate it so much?

By Trevor Butterworth

http://www.trevorbutterworth.com/pause_celebre.htm

Full disclosure: I like semicolons and use them a bit more than I ought to, perhaps.

Comments

[muffyjo]

That's beautiful!

Favorite lines (a small sample):
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?

In fact, one attempt to quash San Francisco's gay marriage law last year was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiff had used a semicolon instead of a conjunction. A conservative group had asked the court to order the city to "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnising marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before the court."