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If anyone knows who is in charge of naming punctuation marks, please put me in touch with him. I have a suggestion to make. I would like to change the name of the semicolon to the "supercomma."

I use semicolons all the time; they're a very cool, but shamelessly underutilized, punctuation mark. They let you take two related sentences and turn them into one double sentence. Throw a semicolon in there, and bang! No need for a period. No need to capitalize that next word. You've just mashed those two sentences together like a girl-on-girl fantasy...and it's all 100% grammatically correct.

And yet I feel like I only see semicolons in novels or legal documents. No one uses them in casual correspondence, like emails. Forget about song lyrics. And to this day, no one has ever used a semicolon in a text message.

I think the problem is the crappy name. Semicolons have terrible PR. "Semicolon"? Half of a colon? Who wants half a colon? It's not even fair, if you think about it: a semicolon, with that comma at the bottom of it, probably takes up more space than a regular colon, with the second dot. It's a bad rap.

"Supercomma" makes much more sense. It's a comma with a reverse exclamation point. How awesome is that? Who wouldn't want to use a supercomma every chance they got? You'd be seeing triple and quadruple and sextuple sentence combinations, riddled with supercommas!

Also, I think the "?!" question mark-exclamation point combo that has come into vogue to express shock and confusion should be named an "exclametion mark."

I'm going to go try and find a girl now.