Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction event on the horizon. I’m talking about the poor, misunderstood semicolon.
Yes, that most elegant of punctuation marks – sitting elusively somewhere between an en-dash and a colon – is officially under threat. Its usage in English books has been slashed almost in half in the last 25 years, according to new research by language-learning software Babbel and reported by The Guardian. It appears once in every 390 words today, compared with every 205 in 2000.
