The Bronze Medal

So the semi­colon is exact­ly what it looks like: a sub­tle hybrid of colon and comma. Actu­al­ly, in ancient Greek, the same sym­bol was used to indi­cate a ques­tion. And it still seems to have a ves­ti­gial inter­rog­a­tive qual­i­ty to it, a cue to the read­er that the writer is not fin­ished yet; she is hold­ing her breath. For exam­ple, if the sen­tence above—“She looked at me; I was lost for words”—occurred as dia­logue in a piece that I was copy-editing, I would be tempt­ed to poke in a peri­od and make it into two sen­tences. In gen­er­al, peo­ple—even peo­ple in love—do not speak in flights that demand semi­colons. But in this instance I have to admit that with­out the semi­colon some­thing would be lost. With a peri­od, the four words sink at the end: SHE LOOKED at me. The semi­colon keeps the words above water: because of that semi­colon, some­thing about her look is going to be sig­nif­i­cant.

— Semicolons; So Tricky

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