Via Tim Bray I read this enlightening piece about how the semicolon is treated like a foreign invader in the territories of American English prose.

I’ve seen some evidence of this semicolonic animosity elsewhere but I have never given it much thought. The semicolon is just a piece of punctuation that I use between two independent clauses to pause, and that does not warrant the intrusion of a full stop (i.e., the period) or the jarring attention of an em dash, and does not imply a familiarity between the two clauses to justify a simple comma, and that the addition of a precise conjunction (with or without the comma) would be too spoon-feeding. I do try, however, not to overuse it and to just sprinkle my prose sparsely.

I like the semicolon; it’s full of subtlety.