Carry on, it says cheerfully, all the while preparing to die 

Kurt Vonnegut
| Photo Credit: AP

The semicolon is dying; sadly, there are no signs of grief anywhere. Perhaps because nobody really knows what to do with the punctuation mark that is a full stop on top and a comma below. It is neither; it is both. A grammarian’s Schrodinger’s cat, existing in two states at once. 

Yet, I love that “handy little fellow” as Abraham Lincoln called the semicolon; and this, despite all the terrible jokes it inspires. Who wants a semicolonoscopy? 

Kurt Vonnegut dismissed the semicolon as a “transvestite hermaphrodite representing absolutely nothing.” If someone tells Trump that, he will probably sign an Executive order banning the semicolon from his kingdom. 

It was born in 1494, in the work of Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius (who also introduced italics). It’s use rose by 388% between 1800 and 2006, before falling by 45% over the next 11 years. In 2017 it began a gradual recovery, with a 27% rise by 2022. How do I know all this? Well, researchers with lots of time on their hands sat and counted everything; after they read this, they might adjust that figure (as an aside, I had a friend in college who wrote: He pissed into the ocean once/And spent the rest of his life/ Measuring the consequent rise in sea level). 

There is something very Indian about the semicolon. It is hierarchical, yet democratic. It allows coexistence without integration. It lets ideas stand on their own while admitting they are part of a larger family. If the full stop is the head of the family and the comma the chatty aunt, the semicolon is the thoughtful cousin who studied abroad and returned with strange views about socialism and avocados. 

In the age of emojis and messages that ignore words altogether (IMO u r OK), the semicolon is an endangered species. Its subtlety is lost on an audience that prefers the emoji shrug to the shrug implied in the space between two independent clauses. It is a mark that says, “Carry on.” Not with the brash certainty of a comma, but with the tentative optimism of a writer who believes that meaning lies in the pauses between thoughts. It separates clauses that could be full sentences but choose not to be. 

The counter to Vonnegut was spelt out by Hilary Mantel, who has a character say in a novel: I wonder why I ever bothered with sex; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

There will come a day when the semicolon disappears from our keyboards; the Jane Austens, Virginia Woolfs, Charles Dickenses, Mark Twains, all committed users of that punctuation mark will have semicolons removed from their works. Those who think in black or white will have no room for the grey of the semicolon, the punctuation for the undecided. 

Writing like the one you’ve just read, full of semicolons, will then be kept under a glass case in a maximum security museum like the 15th century art that it is.