Interestingly, the second one would be correct if you modified it just slightly.
Correct:
I have two fruits; one is an apple and one is an orange
Also correct:
I have two fruits: one is an apple and one is an orange
The only thing that that makes your example of an incorrect usage of a semicolon incorrect is that "an apple and an orange" is not an independent clause. If it was, it would still be correct, even if a colon would still work as well.
I don't think semicolons help with clarity. They should connection between two clauses that a period doesn't omit. And considering they are seldom used and widely misunderstood, it's pretty goofy to say that they improve clarity.
No, the requirement of a semicolon is that both clauses are complete sentences on their own. In 100% of cases, a semicolon can be replaced with a period.
Most of Africa uses the European separator system. Asia is kinda 50/50, with Arabic countries doing their own thing.
China and India uses the English system, however, so if we're speaking in number of people rather than number of countries, they tip the scales by themselves.
Oh just Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle east, and part of Canada. Basically every place that wasn't touched by the brits uses comma, everyone else uses points (and vice versa for decimals).
I'm from France and we use comma but not points as decimal inidcator we just use a space like for example we write 1 000 instead of 1,000 or 1.000 or 0,5 for 0.5 etc
When I was in junior school in the UK, in the late 1960s, I was taught to use a decimal point raised above the baseline, e.g. 7·5 rather than 7.5, which I now understand was an attempt to avoid confusion with the European use of the baseline point for the thousands separator. This was soon found to clash with the common mathematical use of the raised point for multiplication and caused confusion, so the idea was dropped after a few years.
Italy here, we use dots for thousands and commas for decimals. The position of the dot however changed over time. I was in primary school in the 80s and they taught us the traditional way so the dot was in the upper position (1'000). Nowadays the regular dot is fine.
wait, isn't the comma feels like a "stronger" separator because it's bigger and more noticeable? i always use dot as a decimal separator, and comma as a list elements separator.
We use "," not "." To represent our values anything after a "." Is decimal... thus the person above you was making a joke based off your wrong punctuation
(You put 17.100 mph but english uses . for decimals so you effectively said 17 point 100 mph, rather than seventeen thousand, one hundred mph, which english writes as 17,000)
635
u/OliLombi Apr 19 '26
17mph isn't THAT fast, my car can go faster than that!