Midway through the semester he asked me what the rules are when it comes to the semicolon.

“What do you mean?” I asked, smiling, stalling for time.

“I don’t know what it’s for. It confuses me.”

“Well, the semicolon is tricky,” I said. I had no idea how to use a semicolon. “Actually I think it’s best to avoid it at all costs. It will only get you into trouble.”

The passage above is an extract from a cautionary tale of sexual harrassment published recently in The New York Times, a tale in which the semicolon plays a pivotal role.

A role that it was born to play.

The t&p editorial collective considers the semicolon to be greatly undervalued; in fact some members of the collective have become notorious for shamelessly recasting their prose to allow its more frequent use. The semicolon is the Mama Bear of punctuation; it is a “just right” middle ground between the incessant come-ons of the comma, and the Papa Bear’s party-ending “stop!” A semicolon provides the reader a pause of sufficient length to appreciate the pleasures of the clause before; it also allows her to catch her breath before plunging into the even greater pleasures of the clause beyond.

It is clear that the gentleman quoted above had not read his Strunk and White; had he done so his confusion would have quickly been dispersed as he learned that

if two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punction is a semicolon.

Nor could he have failed to be persuaded by White (or was it Strunk?) that “this simple method of indicating relationship between statements is one of the most useful devices of composition.” One of the most useful devices; we have in this subtle declaration a masterpiece of understated praise which the self-important colon could never hope to earn.

If you remain unconvinced, please reread the article we cite above; see whether you agree with us that, without the semicolon’s modest pause the tale might have been nothing more than another sordid confession of a squalid “run-on sentence” relationship, one which, fueled by the shallow attractions of repeated commas, would have soon raged indecorously out of control. Yes, it is our position that without the semicolon’s “blinking caution light” we would be reading a tale in which the police, while responding to a frantic call to 9-1-1, break down the door of some rat-infested dive to find the lovers sprawled full-length on the floor, each with a smoking grammar-gun in hand, and a fatal period punctuating their broken heart.