The New York Times has a piece up about a dude who hates and then falls in love with semicolons:
It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. Their textbook function — to separate parts of a sentence “that need a more distinct break than a comma can signal, but that are too closely connected to be made into separate sentences” — has come to seem like a dryly beautiful little piece of psychological insight. No other piece of punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle.
As valid as some of his arguments are, we still think they are, as Vonnegut called them, “transvestite hermaphrodites”.