I haven’t seen a semi-colon in ages.

What is it’s proper use?

Guy,

There are two main uses for the semicolon:

1) In place of a conjunction (like and or but):

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

2) As a separator in long or complex lists:

"We have offices in New York, New York; Dallas, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas; and San Francisco, California."

There’s a third use, too, though nothing to do with grammar. In lists of e-mail addresses, it’s often used as a separator.

Altogether a very useful little puctuation mark.

- PW

"Sam huffed off the field, if they don’t want to play by my rules, I’ll take my ball, bat, catcher’s mitt, and oh yeah home plate is mine too; all the stuff they need to play, and go home."

Well, I think my punctution of this would be:

Sam huffed off the field. "If they don’t want to play by my rules, I’ll take my bat, catcher’s mitt and—oh yeah, home plate is mine, too—all the stuff they need to play, and go home."

I’m sure there are other ways.

- PW