English Grammar: Our best punctuation mark is dying out

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there's something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction event on the horizon.

- Helen Coffey, The Independent

I'm talking about the poor, misunderstood semi-colon. Yes, that most elegant of punctuation marks — sitting elusively somewhere between an en-dash and a colon — is officially under threat. Its usage in English books has been slashed almost in half in the last 25 years, according to new research by language-learning software Babbel and reported by The Guardian. It appears once in every 390 words today, compared with every 205 in 2000. In a separate piece of research commissioned off the back of these stark findings, Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar Workbook, found that more than half of British students didn’t know or understand how to use a semicolon. In a survey sent to the London Student Network's 500,000 members, 67 percent of respondents admitted to never or rarely using one, while a mere ll percent claimed to be frequent users. If anything, I'd wager that the latter, self-reported percentage is overly generous — perhaps massaged by students who were willing it, rather than believing it, to be true.