YES, LET’S TALK ABOUT SEMICOLONS: Commenting on John Tierney’s tampons post, Charlie Martin writes:

I’d rather start a conversation about semicolons. People don’t give semicolons enough respect. Semicolons make lists clearer; they break complex thoughts into readable stages; they provide a stronger separation than the comma without implying a parenthetical — although the long dash was used in that way in earlier times. And they don’t even have their own names: “semicolon” as if they were a defective, smaller colon, when in fact they are actually bigger and have more interesting contours. I think we need a national conversation about semicolons.

Then we can start on the oxford comma.

This University of Bristol page endorses the semicolon as “a hugely powerful punctuation mark. Getting it right will not only impress your tutors and future employers, it will allow you to express your ideas and opinions with more subtlety and precision than ever before.” Ah, so maybe the semicolon is a British affectation and thus un-American? I suspect some copyeditors think so. I’m with Charlie. (And I’m always trying to sneak Oxford commas into Bloomberg View.)