Is Modern Life Killing the Semi-Colon?

H

Hornius Emeritus

2,500+ Posts
I think that modern life IS killing the semi-colon. It's always been sort of the bastard child of punctuation marks; not quite a comma, a little less than a colon. And think about how infrequently you see the semi-colon here on Hornfans. Why is that? Is it because it's too mealy-mouthed, when we here at Hornfans are aiming for the short, declarative, verbal jabbing that the colon provides? Is it because nobody really knows HOW to use them?

The Link
 
I teach English as a Foreign Language. HEAVY emphasis on grammar, but absolutely no emphasis on punctuation unless I am editing one of my students' written work.

I basically recommend short, declarative sentences. Hemingway style. It's easy to understand.

So put me in the category of not really knowing how to use it. I think that it can be used to separate clauses after a colon, but I don't know for sure.

hookem.gif
 
Modern life is killing the English language. Let's see:

- then / than
- "should of"
- there / their
- horn's / horns' / horns
- LOL, LMAO, and all the other ******** acronyms
And a ton of others that I can't think of right now
 
I use semi-colon's all the time, they are a great way to combine two related thoughts that would be stub sentences disrupting the flow of the paper otherwise.

My biggest pet-peeve about English is when people say "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes." I'm slightly annoyed when they say it out loud but can forgive them because it's a slur, like "gonna." But writing it is totally unforgivable.
 
John Irving's writing is the best example of the proper use of the semi-colon that I have ever seen. I remember reading A Prayer for Owen Meany when I was at UT and as I was just getting into the book I told my girlfriend, this guy gets the semi-colon. His application of it was perfect.

This may seem petty to a lot of people, but I think that good grammar, punctuation and spelling indicate clear thinking and good expression of one's thought. Good, clear writing pulls me in. Sloppy writing makes me want to bail on the author immediately; I just can't take them seriously. Holy crap, look at the use of the semi-colon back there just now. See what I mean.
 
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
 
I love the off-season.

I probably see more properly used semicolons on Hornfans than I do in all my classes put together(and one of my primary jobs is to hound future journalists about their grammar and punctuation).

I see a lot more comma splices in class, but they're certainly at home here, too. I'm really can't tell if this is intentionally humorous or not:

In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
I use semi-colons all the time. Do I use them properly? That is another question entirely.

I find that so few people know how to use them properly, that when I use them people don't even question it, thinking: "that guy is pretty smart, look; he uses semi-colons."

See, I did it right there!
 
I'm pro-semicolon. I use them, and I use them properly.

The only thing that sucks about as much as OU is someone who doesn't know the proper use of a semicolon, yet uses them anyway.
 
To adapt is fine, but to write "my car is better then yours" that's not adapting. It's butchering. It's the mark of someone who hasn't read a ******* book or even a newspaper in his or her whole life.

Another one: capital / capitol

A while back I was watching the local news, and the current article was titled "Live music capitol of the world". This was in big letters, for everyone to see. Looks like nowadays not even a news station cares about proper English.
 
You know, after reading through this thread, I may have to take back what I said about seeing more properly used semicolons on Hornfans.
 
I am anti-semicolon. I see no reason to use a semi-colon when you could instead split the thoughts into two sentences. Two short sentences are generally easier to read than one long one. And since nobody speaks with a semicolon inflection, I don't know why you would ever write one.
 
A lot of you have this all wrong; the semicolon is your friend. When a comma isn't enough and two sentences makes things look stilted, the semicolon is just perfect.

It's simple English, only slightly more complicated than avoiding apostrophes with most plurals.
 
I find semi-colons to be an elegant way to express an extended thought with two parts; it also works well for two related thoughts. It makes me sad that they are slowly falling into disuse along with so many other elements of our written language.

Of course, I'm also irritated that the BBC is moving further and further away from their use of Received Pronunciation, but that's just because I'm a bit of a traditionalist about such things.
 
In the link above, the author uses the semi-colon twice in the second paragraph.

quote-
It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations - to name no names - tend to reserve for footballers, footballers' wives or (if they're lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one's profession as "thinker".

Is he using it incorrectly the second time? That part seems like a sentence fragment to me.

I suck at grammar and subscribe to what the above poster called a Hemingway approach to righting
tongue.gif
 
VL, I am reasonably certain that there are only two correctly used semicolons on this entire thread. Your example is not one of them.

Edit: It is a very slow work day; I actually went back and counted eight, including the one in this sentence, correct usages of the semicolon.

As a Java and formerly C programmer, I would also like to acknowledge the usefulness of the semicolon in these languages. If you really want to **** up your punctuation rules, learn a programming language. Periods, quotation marks (both single and double), parentheses, colons and the venerable semicolon will never be the same.

I would also like to lodge a formal complaint regarding un-necessary hyphenation.
 
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