Semicolonoscopy

This may not sound like much of a topic, but I want to examine the semicolon. Yes, the semicolon. I’ve realized it is an endangered species with few natural habitats left. Short, snippy, snarky sentences have been encroaching on its territory like Burmese pythons in the Everglades.

Even AI has gotten into the act. Try running a text with semicolons through ChatGPT. It will come back to you bereft of semicolons, along with an explanation that the suggested revisions increase readability and flow; the resulting version, it claims, is more polished than your original. And although it doesn’t come right out and say so, the implication is that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for using it; indeed, you are ashamed.

Polished or not, I don’t mind semicolons in my reading. Whether Jane Austen, James Joyce, or Thomas Pynchon, I like the slow flow of words, ideas, and images as if drifting along in an inner tube. Pynchon, not the minimalist, spreads semicolons generously throughout his pages as if feeding bread to ducks in a pond. And he has bags of bread.

Not so in my writing. Editors want me to get to the point, develop the point, and move on to the next point. That may not be entirely true or even fair, but that’s my impression. Action demands staccato not legato phrasing. After all, who has the time? Certainly not the reader. So, I end up sneaking semicolons into narrative sections where I let loose a bit. I can get away with a few, not Pynchon-like but not python-like, either.

Since its introduction in the 1490s, the peculiar squiggle has gotten mixed reviews. According to Abraham Lincoln, “I have great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap.” While it may have been a useful chap, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., thought it was also a haughty chap. “All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he said.

Interesting, since most college students don’t know what to do with it. They use it less and less in their writing, reflecting the overall trend. If you count semicolons the way they measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a semicolon appeared once for every 90 words in 1781, once for every 205 words in 2000, and—just 25 years later—once for every 390 words today. You see where things are headed. It’s a climatic catastrophe for the semicolon.

I don’t think the semicolon’s decline and fall marks the end of civilization, as some have wryly suggested, but it does point to the rise of the pythons and the python way of thinking. By the way, there are hardly any native species left in the Everglades, and authorities have had to take drastic measures, including deploying robotic rabbits, to counter the invasive snakes. That’s not a joke.

Something similar happened to the apostrophe, but supporters of the apostrophe fought back. In 2001, The Apostrophe Protection Society (also not a joke) was established “to preserve the correct use of this important, though much misused, item of punctuation.” It was revived after a hiatus when its founder gave up in defeat, complaining that “the ignorant had won.” Rumors of his joining L’Académie française as a default position are greatly exaggerated.

There may be a way of keeping the squiggle so that it acts like a bridge between commercial and literary fiction. It can preserve thoughtful ambling while working within the structure of action, reaction, and constant movement toward— in my case, at least—identification of a murderer. And why not. Who doesn’t like a good story, and why not be challenged in the course of that story with ever‑evolving, deepening ideas and images?

Insisting on one form of expression to the exclusion of the other cheapens both. Art becomes narcissistic on one hand, and storytelling turns into tabloid journalism on the other. Neither works. But what if we had a way to combine both in the same paragraph, chapter, novel? We’d be operating on two levels, and wouldn’t that be fine. The semicolon does just that—connecting two ideas that could each stand on their own but that enhance each other.

Of course, there are other grammatical worlds to explore, like ellipses and why Boomers are so fond of them, and the Oxford comma, which one reader in particular has been waiting years for. So… there may be no end to these grammatical posts; now, how about that.

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Source: Sara Hashemi, “Could the Semicolon Die Out? Recent Analysis Finds a Decline in Its Usage in British Literature and Confusion Among U.K. Students,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 17, 2025. Image credits: Igor Omilaev, Steve Johnson. For the Oxford comma, see Ann Winters‘ suggestion here.

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