Flowers and pearls: dot, dot, comma, dash
Sarah Pally, a linguist and partner at the agency Partner & Partner, takes a close look at (advertising) language in her column «Blüten und Perlen.» This time: a tongue-in-cheek account of how the semicolon went from being an unassuming punctuation mark to an emoticon and finally to an emoji relic—and why genuine emotions still arise primarily through language.
The moon face is ready! Faces were constructed from punctuation marks not just a hundred years ago. The smiley face from the sixties (invented by an advertising graphic designer - and not Forrest Gump) was digitized in the eighties (by a computer scientist), depicted crutch-like using punctuation and special characters and immediately expanded in its expressiveness. It was now not only smiled, but also winked, smiled, regretted and kissed without being asked. Emoticons were born.
Characters were used for this that would otherwise hardly ever appear in the wreaths. Do younger generations even know that the semi-colon is a legitimate punctuation mark? Or do they think that only old people use it for their 90s emoticons? In other words, would the semicolon be threatened with extinction if it hadn't changed back in the 1980s?
Tears of emotion
But wait a minute: it wasn't actually a switch at all. The purpose of emoticons and emojis is to convey emotions that are conveyed through intonation and gestures when speaking. They therefore have a function that is not dissimilar to the good old punctuation marks. And so the semicolon has actually only consistently followed its original purpose. But not only punctuation marks, but also the style of writing and choice of words can convey a lot of what is meant. You just have to make a little effort. Just because a text doesn't contain any emojis doesn't make it unemotional. And just because it has heaps of emojis doesn't make you teary-eyed with emotion. Or with laughter. Emotions, an attitude, what is meant still comes across verbally as far as possible, with the way a sentence is constructed, which punctuation marks are used, which vocabulary is linked together and how. The content of a text is never just the content.
Pathological winking
The winking smiley, which probably saved the semicolon once, is a really stupid thing though. What's the point? Nobody winks in real life either - or if they do, it's something pathological. Is it perhaps an inner attitude that you would never show verbally, but which slips out in writing? For example: I wrote it like that (but I don't actually mean it like that, höhöhö). Ooops, the subconscious has already put in a winking smiley. And that's actually just a logical continuation of the semicolon: it's neither a period nor a comma and is simply irritating at first.
High time to become uncool
With emojis (invented by an interaction designer), however, emoticons have now largely become obsolete again - so perhaps the extinction of the semicolon will come after all, just a little later? And with emojis, it seems, a lot of other things have also become obsolete: using real words in all their facets accurately and appropriately. So it's high time they finally became uncool again. Emojis, that is. It's also high time that the semicolon became cool again.
Ah no, the semicolon was never cool, sorry. :-/
Analyzed since 2025 Sarah Pally In her column "Blossoms and Pearls", she uses industry-related terms and comments on them with a personal touch, from a linguistic perspective - as well as with a precise view of developments in the industry. Pally is a partner in the Partner & Partner agency in Winterthur. She has been working in the fields of content marketing, text/concept and storytelling in the communications and marketing sector for 15 years.
