Some of his neighbours he met, willy nilly, but they took no place in his mental record of things, save perhaps the place of punctuation marks, commas and semicolons for the most part, rarely rising to the definite degree of a full point and never approaching the dramatic significance of an exclamation mark.
"The Orchard of Tears"
Sax Rohmer
Nineteenth century punctuation made much more use of commas, hyphens and semicolons, and these have been retained as much as possible.
"Tom Brown at Oxford"
Thomas Hughes
He performed this task with such conscientiousness, and made so many minor alterations-he changed most of those flighty colons to more conventional semicolons-that the confidential clerk swore terribly when he glanced at the proofs before handing them to a boy, with instructions to remove three-quarters of the offending emendations.
"The Ghost Ship"
Richard Middleton