Ancient Greek culture was extremely based on oral speech and they didn’t pay much attention to writing. Things might have been different if they enjoyed the convenience of paper or of a computer, but the fact is that oral speech determined their thinking – and oral speech tends to unite the words and express the distinctions with differences in the colours and dynamics of a voice. Our culture is based on written speech, and we need all of these symbols and spaces and accents in order to give to our paper-expression something of the strength that it lacks compared with oral speech. Written words are already poor enough, they don’t need our help for that. The battle of the semicolon, where semicolon is rather defeated for the moment, belongs to a group of similar battles, by which we damage our thinking.

Cf. at Salon: Is the semicolon girlie?