PEOPLE HAVE BEEN GANGING UP ON the semi-colon recently, even threatening to do away with it altogether. We must end this madness at once; right here, right now; full stop.

The bid to flush this vital punctuation mark out of our prose — let us call it semi- colonic irrigation — began, inevitably, in the US. Writing in the Financial Times, Trevor Butterworth reported: “Americans see the semi-colon as punctuation’s axis of evil.” He quoted an essay by Donald Barthelme: “Let me be plain: the semi-colon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly, I pinch them out of my prose.”

Americans have long regarded the semi- colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.

Kurt Vonnegut was damning: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

The word comes from the Greek (meaning limb, or clause), but modern Greeks have virtually abandoned the semi-colon, which no longer features on Greek keyboards and now appears only in articles lamenting the disappearance of the semi-colon. Sub-editors on this newspaper (though not on this section, obviously,) have been known to whip them out in favour of something a little less fancy. I expect David Cameron wields a mean semi-colon, but I somehow rather doubt whether John Prescott, a living exclamation mark, is much of a semi-colon man.

Even Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, following up the semi-colon controversy in The Guardian, expressed doubts about deploying the little fellow. “I came to the semi-colon late,” he writes, “and, like many people, I fret before using it in anything other than lists.”

Now you may think that a comma with a hat on is not worth busting your (Lynne) truss over, but you would be wrong. The semi-colon is one of the most subtle and versatile tools in the language. Most punctuation marks were invented to aid speaking in public, but the semi-colon is uniquely an aid to reading alone, in silence. The earliest general use of the semi-colon in English was in 1591, Shakespeare’s sonnets are full of them, and Ben Jonson was a big fan. Despite its reputation as an effete English literary confection, the semi-colon owes its modern inception to an Italian, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius the elder, who came up with it as way to separate words opposed in meaning and to mark off interdependent statements.

The beauty of the semi-colon lies in its very vagueness. It indicates both connection and division. It is a gentle way of connecting thoughts, without applying the abrupt brake of a full stop or the breathiness of a comma. It implies a qualification or refinement of the idea stated in the first part of the sentence. Sometimes a string of semi-colons shows an evolving idea or description, a string of interconnected ideas.

Virginia Woolf opens Mrs Dalloway with a lovely spray of semi-colons: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of 18 as she was then) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the tress with smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking . . . ”

This is not to say that semi-colons should be used indiscriminately; quite the reverse.

Interestingly the auto-grammarian on this computer has objected to that last semi-colon and placed a small green line under it, advising me: “If the marked semi-colon does not join two groups of words that would make sense as separate sentences, replace the semicolon with a comma. Alternatively, delete the semicolon and use no punctuation.”

I disagree: a comma would make the sentence move too fast, and a full stop would be disruptive.

Semi-colons, in my opinion, are where it’s @. Which brings us to another pressing punctuation problem. What should we call the “@” symbol that now, thanks to e-mail, permeates everyday English usage? Other languages have come up with a delightful variety of names. According to a list compiled by Karen Steffen Chung, of National Taiwan University, in Israel the @ is known as a strudel, on account of its rolled shape. Others, however, think the curl resembles a monkey’s tail, and use various versions of the word for “monkey”: mamjun in Serbian, majmunsko in Bulgarian, aapstert (ape’s tail) in Afrikaans. The Germans see a curling pig’s tail, Schweinekringel, the Danes see an elephant’s trunk or snabel, and the Poles see a sleeping kitten, kotek. The Finns have gone a step further, and invented an onomatopoeic word, miuku mauku: that, apparently, is what cats say in Finland, In Mongolia, a literal sort of place, the @ sign is Buurunhii dotorh aa, which simply means “a in a round circle”. The Chinese call it xiao lao shu, which means little mouse, and in Russia it is a dog, sobaka, because one of the earliest Russian computer games involved chasing an @-shaped dog around a screen.

All of this makes our “at sign” seem distinctly pedestrian and unimaginative. We need a new word: A curlicue? A cow’s lick? A Brian (as in the snail from The Magic Roundabout)? Suggestions please to ben.macintyre @(strudel, dog, little mouse)thetimes.co.uk

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