Smithsonian Magazine - The semicolon has long been a divisive punctuation mark. Since its first reported use published by the Italian printer and humanist Aldus Manutius the Elder in the 1490s, people have both sung its praises and argued for its demise.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the punctuation mark’s supporters: “I have a great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap,” he wrote. The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, on the other hand, was steadfast in his derision of the semicolon. “All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he wrote of them.
Now, it seems like those in Vonnegut’s camp may be winning the fight, according to the results of a recent analysis and survey commissioned by Babbel, a language learning software firm.
The work found that the use of the semicolon in English language books has long been declining, culminating in a dramatic drop in the last 20 years, according to a statement from the company. British literature in 1781 contained a semicolon about once every 90 words, but in 2000, the semicolon appeared once every 205 words. Today, the punctuation mark shows up just once every 390 words—a nearly 50 percent fall from the start of the century.
Sparked by this apparent decline, Babbel also asked University of Kansas grammarian Lisa McLendon to create a survey and multiple choice quiz about semicolon use to test the knowledge of some of the 500,000 young learners in the London Student Network. More than half of the respondents did not know how to correctly use the punctuation mark. Only 11 percent described themselves as “frequent users of the semicolon,” and the average score on the semicolon quiz was 49 percent.
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