Reader's Digest: July 19, 2025

An article in the Smithsonian Magazine brings word of a 7th great extinction, not as terrifying as the 6th, but not on that account negligible; in it, Sara Hashemi reports that the use of the semicolon is in sharp decline:

British literature in 1781 contained a semicolon about once every 90 words, but in 2000, the semicolon appeared once every 205 words. Today, the punctuation mark shows up just once every 390 words—a nearly 50 percent fall from the start of the century.

In a study by Lisa McLendon at the University of Kansas, only 11% of students described themselves as “frequent users of the semicolon”; and the mean score on a quiz designed to test their semicolon skills was less than 50%. As a lover of the semicolon, I mourn the lost complexity: the intricate, internal rhythm of compound thoughts; the grammatical tolerance of indecision (should this be a separate sentence? fuck it, I’ll go semicolon!); the elegance of the articulated list.

McLendon speculates that students may avoid the semicolon because they are afraid they’ll make a mistake; I sympathize, but the only mistake is not to try—this is how we learn—and in forsaking the semicolon one forsakes such models as Virginia Woolf (1,000 in Mrs. Dalloway alone) and MLK, Jr. (whose “Letter from Birmingham Jail” includes a page-and-a-half sentence of hurtling rhetorical momentum, barely held in check by “…; …; …;”); but we should not dwell on quantity over quality; consider that immaculate stylist, Martin Amis, whose masterpiece, Money, is said (by the critic James Diedrick) to use only one semicolon, in its final sentence:

Now here’s that Georgina at last, moving clear of the crowd; her smile is touching and ridiculous—delighted yet austere, and powerfully confident—as she ticks towards me on her heels.

Alas, the tale’s too good to be true; I found another on page 35:

Ditto with ball-kneeing, shin-kicking and eye-forking; they were all new ways of expressing frustration, fury and fear, and of settling arguments in my favour.

BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about the history of punctuation.