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The semicolon.

A punctuation not well understood by many, its main use these days is for winky faces. ;) It's a shame, really, because of how useful it is in writing. We all know how to make an exclamation! Is there anyone who doesn't know what a question is? And then, of course, we have the comma and the period. We all can use these quite well, so why not the semicolon?

Well the semicolon is really a supplementary punctuation item, so I can understand why it isn't used all that much. I guess if you don't do much writing, it isn't very necessary at all. I try to use it all the time though. Even in emails, I find myself trying to squeeze in a semicolon somewhere.

So how do you use a semicolon? Well, it is used to join related sentences together. You can certainly use a comma to join two sentences, but the semicolon does it a little differently. The semicolon attaches two sentences directly; it does not need a helper word like for, and, not, but, or, yet, or so. Each half of the sentence holds the same weight; they're two sentences that effectively complement each other. It is not a good idea to use too many in a row however; the paragraph will sound very choppy.

It can also be used similar to a comma, but where you need to separate commafied groups. This can be used to link different lists together or maybe to separate locations that have commas.

• From three different stores I bought apples, bananas, and oranges; nuts, bolts, and thread seal; and shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant.
• I went to Denver, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Miami, Florida.

tl;dr
At length, "tl;dr" can be expanded out to "It was too long; I did not read it." This is a complete and proper sentence. However, there is a good deal of redundant information that can safely be removed. Just as telling someone, "Call 911!!" is considered complete even though we are missing the subject, saying "Too long; didn't read," removes the easily assumed parts of the sentence and still works. The rest is inferred by the context.

It kinda surprised me when I thought about tl;dr and how it functions grammatically. I think someone put quite a bit of thought into making this little piece of short-hand notation.

I think about weird things like this sometimes. Ok, a lot of the time. If I get inspired to write about any other of my weird thoughts, you'll find a post soon after!