Point-virgule

Paul Collins at Slate on the rise and fall of the semicolon; killed first at the hands of the Romantic dash and buried by the "Victorian Internet," the telegraph.

Best part of the article: while Collins explains the early 18th-century interpretation of the semi-colon as a two-breath pause, he never delineates when, why, and where a semicolon is used in current usage (whether high-waistcoat-grammatical or base common popular). All the more fitting; the semicolon is the punctuation mark whose use nobody seems certain about.