When the NYTimes....

....dogs out the semicolon, you know there's going to be trouble:

I spend a lot of time trying to get writing students to understand that the words we use for feelings — “happy” and “sad” and “stoked” and “sketchy” — do a terrible injustice to the subtlety of our actual emotions. And yet here is a language, native to I.M., in which people routinely communicate using emoticons — those little punctuation-faces. I’m not saying that I have actually used an emoticon. But as long as I I.M., the possibility exists, and I find it a little chastening. The one good thing to say about emoticons — especially the winking happy face — is that it offers the only legitimate use of the semicolon outside academic writing. (Times Select)

I have to teach students how to use the damn thing and, as far as I'm concerned, it should be abolished for the pretentious anachronistic throughback that it is.