"The semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." Others disagree.

Pause celebre
By Trevor Butterworth

The sea spat like a thug into the back garden; fitful clouds unleashed volley after volley of rain; and all around the wind howled as if a ghostly cavalry charge had borne down upon Termon House, an 18th-century architectural curiosity perched above a narrow, stone-wracked beach. It was New Year’s Eve on the turbulent coast of Donegal, and inside the kitchen of this lonely guesthouse, the gaggle of celebrants - refugees from the forced gaiety of Dublin and London - were girding themselves for literary battle. Sort of.

”You’re kidding,” said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation’s axis of evil. Or at least many of them do. “But I like semicolons,” she protested, “they allow a writer to go further.” Trevor McGuinness, a business manager, was equally incredulous. “Hazlitt,” he said, smacking the table indignantly, “look at Hazlitt!” Had midnight been closer and the bottle emptier, we might have taken him literally; but the point still floated within the grasp of sober minds: if so great a prose stylist as William Hazlitt had embraced the semicolon, then surely we could too?

Now, you may be thinking of a more pertinent question: why, of all the possible topics that might have stirred passions on New Year’s Eve, the semicolon? But why not? Punctuation is hot: Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots Leaves is to this decade what The Joy of Sex was to the 1970s - a guide for those of us fumbling over what should come naturally. And we fumblers are legion. In America, the book occupied a place on The New York Times top-10 bestseller list for 38 weeks, selling more than 1.2 million copies.

What accounts for this sudden surge in punctophilia? Perhaps the general loss of old-school learning - memorised historical dates, multiplication tables, the odd stanza or sonnet - has sent a frisson of intellectual status anxiety through the newly middle-aged middle classes. And what could be more unnerving than a slipshod grasp of punctuation?

More: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0ca549d2-25a9-11da-a4a7-00000e2511c8.html