The melancholy decline of the semicolon

[mac-chaffee]

I use them a lot to control the tone of what I write. Since periods can indicate a serious or angry tone[1], I often need some other way to indicate a separation between two complete sentences. For example: "It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y." Using a period could be perceived as anger, but using a comma would make that sentence a comma splice.

[1] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q?t=3m3s

[behnamoh]

I wish there were more symbols for other use cases, too. I honestly think the standardization of things in the 20th century actually prevented lots of innovations in language and alphabet. Nowadays, you can't even imagine adding or removing a letter to/from the alphabet. Heck, we can't even change the layout of the current alphabet on keyboards because QWERTY is just too much standardized. In fact, forget about alphabet; we can't even change the symbols on keyboards (who says I must only use `~!@#$%^&* ... on my keyboard?) Sure you can use unicode characters, but why haven't the special characters on keyboards changed at all since the 80s? The answer: standardization.

The evolution of languages, words, alphabets, and special characters helped shape the way we think about things, and since the 20th century, that hasn't changed that much.

[ghoomketu]

Wow never really knew this. I guess you need to have deep understanding of the language and maybe have English as your mother tongue to pick up on such things. No wonder text is so emotionless and people misread and get angry about what they think it means all the time. Yet, nobody misreads the tone of your voice or facial expressions.

Like in India we have a very common expression "I'm writing to intimate you.." which my American boss got really angry to read. For us it just means i'm writing to tell you, but many people esp from older gen use this a lot here to sound cool.

[tomcam]

Former professional journalist and tech writer here. Disagree. At least since Hemingway brief sentences using periods instead of complicated sentences separated by semicolons has been considered not particularly angry. Short sentences also reduce cognitive load on the reader.

[pixl97]

Heh, I think my daughters generation will just replace them with emojis.

[elb2020]

"It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y."

"It looks like you forgot to do X. That's needed to do Y."

I would actually prefer the second one here. It's neutral and to the point.

I guess the problem with the first one is that the reader might interpret the semicolon exactly in the way that you intended it, as an attempt on your behalf to "control the tone". Depending on the personal disposition of the receiver he or she may or may not like it.

[dgellow]

> Since periods can indicate a serious or angry tone

I will forever refuse this idea. I use a period to end my sentences because that’s how a sentence ends, not to communicate a tone.

[cryptonector]

At some point I was taught that in English (not my first language) short sentences are the norm. Now you tell me that short sentences convey a harsh tone. What is one to do?!

I use semi-colons as a sort of conjunction, not unlike the example you gave, in part to give me a way to lengthen sentences that would otherwise seem much too short.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Didn't emoji somewhat solved this problem?

[einpoklum]

"The semicolon is a profound public mystery; the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance."

That sentence should have used a colon, not a semi-colon, IIANM.

The digital world churns; Twitter is not an arena known for reflection. Semicolons, then, are snottily elitist and shadily indirect.

The elitist snottiness is in assuming people live their lives on Twitter and the like. They don't.

the semicolon has been usurped by ... the Dash

Well, _maybe_ some authors use more dashes than they used to (I actually doubt that, but never mind) - but a dash is not a substitute for semicolon. Their semantics are too different for that to be possible, IMHO. Take the first sentence in this paragraph: You can't replace the dash there with a semicolon, as that would mean splitting the "maybe" and "but" clauses into separate, not-directly-related clauses; you just can't do that.

indicating a pause

Not just a pause; a semicolon is also a semantic distancing. Two phrases separated by a comma are really an inseparable part of the same idea idea; if you separate them by a semicolon, they can each stand in their own right.

[denton-scratch]

> That sentence should have used a colon, not a semi-colon, IIANM.

I think you are mistaken. The two clauses are full sentences. They could have been separated by a full-stop/period, but the semi-colon makes them part of the same "thought".

[amelius]

> Two phrases separated by a comma are really an inseparable part of the same idea idea; if you separate them by a semicolon, they can each stand in their own right.

A semicolon is a period and a comma combined. This makes me think that if the first part logically should end with a question mark or exclamation mark, we should have corresponding symbols for that.

[mdp2021]

I am seeing a use of the instruments that seems quite confused.

The semicolon is part of the division of the expression of thought in supersets and subsets of structural affinity: comma, semicolon, period, new paragraph. (Which also means that the semicolon has a necessary role in general: whenever the structure is best defined also using that level of affinity.)

The dash, the colon and the brackets are instead related to the modality of relation: the colon to express dependency, the dash to provide detail, the brackets to insert a note parallel to the main flow.

(Note: there is also a sub-function of the semicolon to separate list items. I did not use it in the paragraph just above as I intended to exploit the "nuclear" aspect of comma-separated list items, but that is a rhetorical option and the semicolon would have been necessary for more complex items.)

[minimilian]

Did you mean `full-stop' in your 2nd paragraph, or are you ascribing a double role to the colon and ignoring the full-stop?

According to Fowler (The King's English), there was a time when the difference between , ; : . was merely quantitative (which explains the name `semicolon').

[jorgesborges]

This is an excellent comment thank you. You put into words some of my unconscious inklings. Is there any reading you can recommend on the topic that isn’t a dry grammar manual — something akin to Strunk and White, or a good blog? If not I suppose you could write one :)

[zozbot234]

> The melancholy decline of the semicolon

I blame JavaScript developers. /s

[Flankk]

Possibly related? In both usages it is seen as elitist and unnecessary. I personally use them in JS because the code is aesthetically gross without them.

[Sebb767]

Clearly Lisp is the actual source of all evil ;)

[__s]

Semicolons aren't just for high literature: https://serprex.github.io/w/;

> Semicolons are hot

Dash seems a poor substitute. A dash is closer to a period. Semicolons work well for when just using multiple commas would become ambiguous. Shorter sentences also solve that, but sometimes you want a run on sentence, sometimes you want to splice more context in at this very point. & sometimes you just want to drop a conjunction

[ineedasername]

I had to read a lot of Heidegger, who was interesting on a macro level but interminably boring on the micro level needed to see the macro. His readability was helped by the use of very visible double dashes-- sort of an extended version of the double-comma appositive structure in a sentence-- so the structure of his writing was easier to follow.

I liked that much more visual que enough that I adopted it myself for a while. Over time, I recognized that when I found myself reaching for the technique it meant that I probably needed to restructure things into more discrete chunks that build sequentially. When possible, conveying complex information benefits from as simple a structure as the information can manage.

[im3w1l]

Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.

[Sebb767]

When you need to write text for a wide audience, shorter sentences are usually preferable. Most business schools even teach briefness as an explicit target, as far as I know. That's quite different compared to the origins of writing, where the target were (usually) very literate people.

[darkerside]

Was going to comment this. Are there any great examples in all of literature where a period would not have been a good replacement fora semicolon?

As a side note, I am only a little offended by the idea that fiction writers should use semicolons to make their writing more literate or fancy. But I think simple writing is always better, even when you are trying to convey beauty. I believe great flowery literature is great in spite of the floweriness, not because of it.

[Causality1]

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

[magicalhippo]

In my native language classes I was always told by my teachers to try to make shorter sentences. If I do a second pass, I always delete words or split sentences into two.

[every]

Semicolons drown adventurers every day in NetHack and show no signs of decline:

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/;

[boulos]

I'm surprised they didn't mention the controversial Vonnegut advice to never use semicolons (e.g., [1]).

[1] https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/vonnegut...

[zuj]

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does.

(autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

[Tyr42]

Well, have you ever run into the

    x = some_long_expression
            + another_long_expression

problem? In Python you need to be careful to wrap that in () or use a \ before the newline to avoid it parsing as two lines, e.g.

    x = some_long_expression;
    + another_long_expression;

In particular, if you have a builder expressions

    let x = someBuilder()
            .setVal(x)
            .build()

You'd need to wrap the entire thing in () to avoid it getting mad, right?

So if you're going to terminate expressions with ), and start them with (, why not just terminate them with ; instead?

Javascript is a "Semicolons Optional" language, but it's actually the worst of both worlds, as you have to be very careful not to wrap lines like

    function() {
         some stuff;
         return
            really_long_named_thing;
    }

As it'll just insert a ; on the return, returning undefined for you.

[vlmutolo]

It's a lot easier to format code arbitrarily when a language is whitespace-independent.

For example, to do method chaining across multiple lines, Python requires parentheses around the whole chain. That's a quirk of being a whitespace-dependent language.

In general, I think people who advocate for braces and semicolons just find it easier to reason about the code when they know that the formatting doesn't matter. All the flow is done via visible glyphs.

[Denvercoder9]

It's a trade-off. You can either assume all statements end at the end of the line, and require a continuation character (backslash in Python) if that isn't the case; or you can require a statement terminator (semicolon/closing brace in Rust) for all statements.

The downside of assuming statements end at the end of the line is that you need to have special rules for when that isn't the case (such as Python's implicit statement continuation inside braces), while always having a terminator is simpler and more consistent (all statements end with a semicolon) at the cost of extra characters.

[comeonseriously]

There are people who hate python because of the forced indentation. They indent their code in their language of choice, they just don't want something FORCING them to do it.

I'm always flabbergasted at this argument.

[post-it]

In Rust, a block that ends with an expression without a semicolon returns that expression. It lets you write terse things like

    let x = if y { a } else { b }

[igorkraw]

Because then there'd be ambiguity between a function ending and returning unit (nothing) or returning whatever the last line expression returns. You could change things around this, but Rust has a goal of unambiguous syntax, hence also the turbofish::<>

[alpaca128]

Python and Rust have two fundamentally different philosophies. Python is all about quick and intuitive programming and it's pretty good at that, though in turn you can get more kinds of bugs and runtime errors that could have been avoided with proper type checking and other measures.

Meanwhile Rust avoids any kind of behaviour that isn't clearly visible in the code. That includes unambiguous syntax, like the mandatory curly braces for loops and conditions. And of course the semicolon as a clear separator, which comes in handy when iterators or the builder pattern are used.

[vvillena]

Rust uses the semicolon to distinguish between statements and expressions.

[the__alchemist]

In Rust, omitting a semicolon has a special meaning, ie a return from an expression. So, you can't just ditch it.

I wouldn't mind Python's whitespace indents in Rust though!

[jbaber]

I'm pretty happy with the choices made in rust and python. Just want to note that the : in Python is just as superfluous (as rubyists will tell you) and kept only for readability, not for parsing.

[gryfft]

This article does not demonstrate understanding of the semicolon; it is used incorrectly in the first sentence, for crying out loud.

[tpoacher]

My favourite use of the semicolon is in its function as a "supercomma". It just makes sense.

E.g.

"We were joined by three families: John, his wife, Mary, and their son, George; the Middletons; and our neighbours, Jim and Sally from next door."

Alas, whenever I use it, invariably someone who's never seen it used this way will simply have a tantrum until I completely rewrite the whole thing in the most tedious way possible; it's almost not worth using it, for this reason alone.

[denton-scratch]

As a supercomma, a semicolon is necesssary as a list-separator, if you have list-items with embedded commas. Your "three families" example is spot-on. I wouldn't know how to rewrite it, without using some Powerpoint-derived notation, such as bullet-lists, which just isn't conversational.

[minimilian]

> supercomma

duplocomma

[wruza]

I’ve read some shelves in my life, and from a reader’s perspective a good read has never made me think about what punctuation the author used. This is an inside nonsense which only worries idling writers and critics.

[paulcole]

If you’re a good enough writer to know how to property use a semicolon, you’re a good enough writer to not need to use one.

[Decabytes]

I find it amusing that programmers use semicolons more often then writers.

[jokethrowaway]

I enjoy using semicolons when writing, a dash is not always appropriate.

Bonus points if it makes me look like a pompous loner going against society.

Reject modernity, embrace semicolons.

[Pxtl]

It can't be accidental that the article has multiple paragraphs where they use an em dash where a semicolon would've also been appropriate.

[EMM_386]

I find it interesting that I am using semicolons more these days because clients like my work Outlook recommend it in places I wouldn't use it but are correct; as a result, I use it more often.

[bsder]

Meh. Grammar, in general, is on a steep suckiness trend.

For example, when was the last time you saw someone on the web actually use the correct past tense of "lead (verb, transitive)"?

[dmitryminkovsky]

> The semicolon is an element of language that communicates stops, pauses, reflections, and cigarette breaks within a sentence. It connects loose ends with disparate ideas;

In this regard I think the decline of the semicolon is related to the fact that we write knowing that our message will be competing for attention in a busy inbox or feed. Our audience is the harried, harassed reader. There’s not much room for reflection or whimsy in such settings.