Source.

Hold the front page:

Marked decline in semicolons in English books,
study suggests

To complement the Oxford comma, more fodder for punctuation nerds in Amelia Hill’s entertaining recent Guardian article—complete with quiz.

The first use of the semicolon has been attributed to the Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder in 1494. Abraham Lincoln observed, “I have a great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap” (hmm). Virginia Woolf used it over 1,000 times in Mrs Dalloway. Cormac McCarthy included 42 semicolons in his first book, The orchard keeper—but then just one across his next nine novels (and what might we deduce from that, I wonder?!). 

Kurt Vonnegut disapproved of it, averaging fewer than 30 a novel, about one every 10 pages. Salman Rushdie, John Updike, and Donna Tartt each used an average of 300 semicolons for 100,000 words. As if other negative reviews of the Fifty shades trilogy weren’t enough, “E.L. James was criticised for repeatedly using commas inaccurately instead of semicolons”.

Perhaps someone can square these two comments for me:

“Semicolon use in English rose by 388% between 1800 and 2006, before falling by 45% over the next 11 years. In 2017, however, it started a gradual recovery, with a 27% rise by 2022.”

“The semicolon seems to be in terminal decline, with its usage in English books plummeting by almost half in two decades—from one appearing in every 205 words in 2000 to one use in every 390 words today.”

For more, see e.g. here. Now I think we should go the whole hog and sing the praises of the colon too.

Much of the pleasure in reading an article like this lies in marvelling at the projects with which academics manage to fill their time. But there’s no limit to the topics for which statistics can be enlisted—I think of Grootaers’ fieldwork survey documenting the declining numbers of temples in north China villages through the Republican era, and the deities to whom they were devoted.

The language of the novel was effectively dramatised by Monty Python:

For some German punctuation, see The idiot’s apostrophe.