A Farewell; An Apology

I was wrong, and I am sorry.

Arrogance blinded me to the simple truth, but I understand now. I do. I have seen the error of my ways, and I apologize for my transgression. Never again will I be so pretentious as to defend the absolute uselessness of the semicolon.

In the interest of full confession, I will tell you how I came to this conclusion. I wrote a book. It had 95000 words in it. There were also 612 semicolons. So, I challenged myself to see how many I could remove for the reprint without losing whatever effect I was hoping to preserve. Anyone care to guess how many I got rid of? Billy? Sally?

The correct answer is 612 (or all of them). I replaced them all with one of five devices. It was that easy. Can’t say that about a period … or even an ellipsis.

So, again, to all the people I offended with my post begging for the salvation of a useless piece of punctuation, I apologize. I was wrong.  Let it die in peace; useless semicolon.

RIP.