Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Semicolon

My husband and I fell in love, in part, over discussions of the semicolon, a woman told me last year. I’m afraid of it, students tell me every year. Love, fear, or outright hate—the semicolon can elicit them all. People have always had strong feelings about the semicolon, and its history testifies to its ability to touch hearts—or nerves. Here are a few things about its past that you might not know.

Well, not young compared to you and me—but relative to the rest of our punctuation mainstays, the 525-year-old semicolon is a spring chicken. The period dates all the way back to the 3rd century B.C., although it began as a dot placed at the tippy-top of the end of a sentence and