Cecelia Watson, author of “Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.” Historian and philosopher of science. Faculty member in Bard College’s Language and Thinking program.

It is a piece of punctuation that has divided writers and authors for centuries. Novelists including Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have not shied away from using them, but that has not stopped ...

Happy National Punctuation Day, Internet! To celebrate, we've prepared a guide to the most hated punctuation mark of all: the semicolon. Although you won't need it often, it can add essential clarity ...

Most of us are familiar with “Boomer ellipses,” or the ominous ”...” some texters use in place of a full stop or comma. Even double spacing can reveal your age; older typists prefer it, especially ...

“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops ...

It begins with a squinting of the eyes. Hm. A semicolon. You approach it with caution. Ok, I can do this. One dot, plus a comma. There. No, wait. That doesn’t look quite right. The questions begin: ...

The first reported use of the semicolon was in the essay "De Aetna," pictured in part here, by Pietro Bembo and published by Aldus Manutius in the 1490s. Aldus Manutius, Pietro Bembo The semicolon has ...

According to Cecelia Watson, semicolons aren't just punctuation marks. They're also "a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated." That may ...

Ever since Kurt Vonnegut slandered semicolons (“They are transvestite hermaphrodites,” he said, “representing absolutely nothing”), aspiring writers have looked upon them with a mixture of confusion ...

Among the latest shocking news in the world of lexicography is that "tl;dr" has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. This is remarkable for two reasons. First, it may be the only initialism ...