The writer is a science commentator
The slow demise of the semicolon is devastating; there is no punctuation mark quite like it. According to research commissioned by the language-learning platform Babbel, its usage in British English books has slipped since 2000, from once every 205 words to once every 390 words.
Semicolons, thought to have been first used in 1494 by the Italian scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder, are forever damned by writer Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to avoid them. “All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he wrote. If scribblers are wary of looking pretentious, they are even more scared of looking witless: a Babbel student survey suggested that more than half did not know how to use the mark.
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