ThomasLitchford

I guess I always knew the semicolon was an unpopular bit of punctuation. If you read enough, you can just sort of feel it. But I didn’t know the story of the semicolon was so entertaining:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that “All [semicolons] do is show that you’ve been to college.” New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was “semicolon boy.”

It’s like a rocky love affair. We were confused at first. ‘I don’t understand. How does it—wait, it goes where?’ Then we were infatuated. We put it; everywhere; because we were; in love. But then we got a series of promotions at work—the telegraph came along and then the internet—and we didn’t have time for the semicolon. And now most of us have given up hope. We’re not even trying anymore.

Via book/daddy.