The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat FTP: How To Use Semicolons

Semicolons are confusing. Not many people know their purpose. Grammarly fanboys mistake semicolons as a wimpy way to get out of a rambling dependent sentence. Some see them as pretentious marks to betray the writer’s intellectual inferiority complex.

Semicolons have many uses. Some writers will hate them. And that’s ok. Some writers love them. And that’s ok. But using them correctly is tricky.

Me, preferably, I like to use them for stylistic purposes.

Ross Douthat does so here:

In modernity, the former world is always passing away; the solidity of the past always melting into air. But the promise is that tomorrow will bring something new; that a better life is just a long sea voyage or wagon train away; that ours is an age of ever-unfolding wonders that more than compensate for what’s been lost.

Douthat is using semicolons rhetorically here. He deploys a mixture of tricks here to make his point.

Let’s look at his semicolons first. When you read the words, he’s lightly using the Latinate var…