‘More generally, your footnotes are far too long and, goodness me, you don’t know how to use a semicolon, do you?’ These almost throwaway words were addressed to me in the year 2000, during my PhD oral exam.
Reader, I did not use a semicolon again until 2014. As Denise Cowle so rightly says in her YouTube explainer ‘How to use a semicolon’ (which I could have done with 20 years ago), often people are either scared of semicolons so they avoid them altogether, or they scatter them…
