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

[malkin.livejournal.com]

I am very much pro-semicolon. I used to take great glee in teasing my former boss for his semicolon avoidance, whenever I had to edit any of his copy. So great was his disdain for semicolons that he used to go so far as to use incorrect punctuation, where a humble semicolon would have sufficed.