That's going to leave a mark

We're using semicolons less and less; the em dash is now code for 'written by AI'; the apostrophe still stumps most of us. Meanwhile, @, #, :,) have taken on new meanings in email handles and Instagram bios. Hold your commas close because punctuation is changing. We started out with none, but threw in dots, dashes and curls over the centuries. They helped words make sense. Now they're doing even more. K Narayanan joins the dots

- K Narayanan

"Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades," a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May.

Their findings had the desired effect. Websites and newspapers carried opinion pieces linking back to their findings. YouTubers made videos. The grammatically inclined posted on social media, and one assumes Babbel sat back satisfied with the results.

Some writers love the semicolon; others hate it. In recent years, the haters have predominated. It is often easier to read and write two separate sentences than it is to write one sentence with two independent clauses separated by a correctly placed semicolon.

Yet there are those who believe its elegance justifies this additional effort. It is entirely possible that the number of such people is falling...

Punctuation evolves over time.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken, and it remained spoken for millennia. Then writing came along. The earliest written scripts appear only c. 3000 BCE.

By the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was composed in Ancient Mesopotamia, most likely c. 2000 BCE the first punctuation marks had made their appearance, but they weren't punctuation marks in the way we understand them today. They were paralinguistic; that is, they worked to convey meaning beyond the words used. They signalled pauses, long and short.

In Sanskrit, the earliest non-alphabetical marks, the anudatta and svarita, were instructions on intonation. Even by the 5th century BCE, Panini’s seminal grammar did not deal with punctuation. The danda, the horizontal line that signals the end of a sentence, and the double danda, which marks the end of a section, came much later.

In the West, early written text was not broken up into words and sentences; they were a continuous series of letters. The Romans had a name for it: scriptura continua.