I’m talking about the poor, misunderstood semicolon. Yes, that most elegant of punctuation marks – sitting elusively somewhere between an en-dash and a colon – is officially under threat.

“Our findings reveal that the semicolon is an ‘endangered’ punctuation mark - abandoned by many British writers who might have been expected to showcase its value, and often misunderstood by ...

“Our findings reveal that the semicolon is an ‘endangered’ punctuation mark - abandoned by many British writers who might have been expected to showcase its value, and often misunderstood by younger ...

The age-old semicolon is dying out as Britons admit to never or rarely using the punctuation mark, a study has found. In 19th century English literature it appeared once in every 205 words ...

Yet when you put the punctuation mark itself into the database, rather than the word “semicolon”, you get a quite different result – one that looks very much like a steady decline.

Various respected writers, including Kurt Vonnegut, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein and Cormac McCarthy, have publicly denounced my favourite punctuation mark as “showy”, “unnecessary ...

While the combination of a question mark and exclamation point can be effectively replaced by using one of each (“She did what?!”), that somehow lacks the punch of throwing these punctuation ...