The semicolon was invented in Renaissance Venice to mark a pause, not a grammatical rule

Watson traces the semicolon's origin to fifteenth-century Venice, where an early printer used it in a travel narrative to signal a pause in a reader's breath or rhythm that fell somewhere between the shorter pause of a comma and the fuller stop of a period. This origin was fundamentally rhetorical and performative, tied to how a sentence should be spoken aloud or paced when read, rather than being conceived as part of any formal grammatical system dictating sentence structure.

This founding purpose matters because it undercuts the later idea that the semicolon has one single, correct grammatical function that must be rigidly followed. Its earliest use was flexible and intuitive, calibrated to the feel and sound of a sentence rather than to an abstract rule about independent versus dependent clauses. Watson uses this origin story to set up her broader argument that the semicolon's later reputation for rigid technicality was a historical accretion, not an original design feature.

Takeaway: the semicolon started life as a tool for rhythm, not a rule to be memorized and feared.