No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and ...

Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a “Seinfeld ...