Love or detest it, the semicolon is the most divisive punctuation mark of the modern era. Should we even care? “In any case, I had been part-time for a while, coming into the publishing house one day ...

Of all the punctuation marks, the semicolon is far from the most popular. It's fallen in usage since it's heyday in the 1800s. Why was it so big then, and what changed? It might be that folks today ...

Cecelia Watson, author of “Semicolon: The Past, Present and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.” Historian and philosopher of science. Faculty member in Bard College’s Language and Thinking program.

When we first meet private detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, he is thirty-eight years old and has already seen it all. Marlowe is the consummate noir detective, so ...