Ooh so it would be like 'subject' Larry 'verb' is here 'semicolon' ; 'subject' Larry 'verb' is there 'semicolon' ; 'subject' Larry 'verb' is square.
Yes________No
Well, except that those three things probably don't all belong together in one sentence. Better examples would be:
Larry is here; however, he will be leaving tomorrow.
Larry is here; Larry is there; Larry is everywhere at once.
Larry is square; he has never quite managed to be circular.
And for the second way of using them, for separating parts of a list where there is already some internal punctuation:
These are the people who were at the party: my two cousins, Larry and Joe; my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones; my mother, father, and grandfather; my next-door neighbors, Sam and Mary; the old woman with the cat; the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.
Without being able to use semicolons in this way, it would be impossible, for instance, to tell whether Larry and Joe are the names of your cousins, or Larry, Joe, and your cousins are four different people. (The same confusion would apply to Mrs. Jones: she might be your mother, your teacher, or a separate person altogether.)
But if you didn't have any of the
internal commas ("my cousins
, Larry and Joe"), you would not need the semicolons, and the list might read like this:
These are the people who were at the party: Larry, Joe, Mrs. Jones, Sam, Mary, my parents, my grandfather, the old woman with the cat, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.
(This has probably only managed to confuse you more, but that's the way it often is in the world of punctuation.)
