Opinion The semicolon’s subtlety seems to be out of fashion, but not quite out of time

The semicolon — half comma, half colon, all sophistication — that once lent verve to the sentences of writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf seems to have fallen out of grace, its contemporary champions such as Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith notwithstanding. According to a new study commissioned by language-learning software Babbel, the semicolon is in free-fall, vanishing from English prose like correct spellings from WhatsApp exchanges: Its usage has almost halved in the last 25 years.

Of course, this isn’t punctuation’s first casualty. The pilcrow, originally used to indicate a new paragraph, had its moment before slipping into obscurity. The apostrophe is under daily siege. But the semicolon’s retreat cuts deeper. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, it is “a punctuation mark indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma”. Or, in other words, it serves as a gesture towards complexity; a declaration that two thoughts, though independent, might just belong together. The first known usage of the punctuation in print was in 1494 by Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius, who printed it in Pietro Bembo’s essay De Aetna to help make reading a smoother experience. That it is more prone to misunderstanding follows from its reliance on discretion — it is not everyone who can master the subtle variations that the usage of the semicolon demands.

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There is no denying the fact that the semicolon is a rare typographic creature that makes prose breathe differently; that brings a kind of jazz to grammar; a chutzpah that marks originality. In a world run on emojis and algorithmic brevity, it may feel like an endangered relic. Yet, true to form, the semicolon can shapeshift and adapt; make itself plebeian. Consider “Tl;dr” added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in 2013, a brusque emblem of modern haste salvaged by the very mark it seems to sidestep. Its message: Too long; didn’t read.