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• n  a punctuation mark (`; ') used to connect independent clauses; indicates a closer relation than does a period

• Use a colon and a semicolon in a sentence naming possible Bush nominees to the Supreme Court.
• No comma or period can contain her exuberant idiom; no semicolon can keep her from her meandering linguistic path.
• A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease .

News & Articles

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• COLUMN: Confessions of a grammar stickler
  I think that fear and trauma is what led me into a life as a grammar Nazi, the Eva Braun of the semicolon.
  June 16, 2013 - The Westerly Sun

Quotes

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• Kurt Vonnegut in MSNBC
  When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,Vonnegut said with a wheezy laugh worthy of a long-term chain smoker. "My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy...
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Los Angeles Times
  We'd sit on the bus and talk about when to use a colon and when a semicolon,Abdul-Jabbar says.
• Lynne Truss in Telegraph.co.uk
  In her best-selling book on English grammar, Lynne Truss writes: "In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with cross hands, the exclamation mark is the big...