SEMICOLON STILL LIVES; IT146;S GOOD NEWS

It was nearly hidden on a New York City transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspapers behind when they get off the train.

It was nearly hidden on a New York City transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspapers behind when they get off the train.

8220;Please put it in a trash can,8221; riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency8217;s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, 8220;that8217;s good news for everyone.8221;

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, a distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Neches, the 55-year-old New York City transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master8217;s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one8217;s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don8217;t use them because they never learned how. In fact, when Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned. 8220;I thought at first somebody was complaining,8221; he said.
Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster8217;s use of the semicolon to be 8220;impeccable.8221;
Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots 038; Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, called it a 8220;lovely example8221; of proper punctuation. Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, 8220;The semicolon is correct, though I8217;d have used a colon, which would be a bit more sophisticated.8221;
NYC transit8217;s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail and text-messaging may jeopardise the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on in emoticons, the graphic emblems of our facial expressions.
-SAM ROBERTS,NYT