I hope this is the right forum.
Anyhow, I have a few questions of a grammatical nature I’d like to ask the board:
– Are double semicolons; used thusly (albeit incorrectly); acceptable?
– Is ending a sentence such as this??? generally incorrect, the use of ‘!?’ being preferred? And, which comes first? The exclaimation point or the question mark? Thanks.
Attending was George W. Bush, the president of the US; Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK; and Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq.
Otherwise, if you need to use double semicolons, there is probably something wrong with your sentence contruction. It’s not grammatically incorrect, but it’s stylistically awkward.
A good general rule of thumb is to never use an exclamation point unless it’s followed by a quotation mark (i.e., it is part of a quote). I wouldn’t use it with a question mark at all (though maybe Interobang would 
) If you want to give the impression of a blurted out question, there are better ways of doing it, usually with the use of italics: “What is that?”
What RealityChuck said. Just don’t do either of those things, and the world will be a better place for it.
FYI: Using semicolons to separate list items is especially helpful when the list items themselves contain commas. Otherwise, commas generally do a good job of separating list items.
Skeptic_ev has the right of it. Note, however, that there are rare times when multiple semicolons appear outside of a list. I can list these times for you, of course; I can describe the governing rules in detail; I can, alternatively, give you an example sentence.
Daniel
But that’s still a list, Daniel. It’s a list of three things you can do. 
On the interrobang, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary says:
Main Entry: in·ter·ro·bang
Pronunciation: in-‘ter-&-"ba[ng]
Function: noun
Etymology: interrogation (point) + bang (printers’ slang for exclamation point)
Date: 1967
: a punctuation mark <interrobang> designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question
It’s usually used to indicate shock or outrage. “You did what!?” The ! comes first, and more than one of each is probably bad form. If one won’t get your point across, four won’t help.
Kirkpatrick, of The Writer’s Art, encourages use of the semicolon as an occasional style device. If it improves flow and rhythm, you may mate two sentences together with a semicolon**;H**e also encourages capitalizing the start of the second to emphasize the presence of a new thought within the sentence.
Kilpatrick is a writer’s guru. He tends to have a free attitude about rules. They may be disobeyed, if it helps clarity or rhythm of the sentence.
The use of multiple semicolons in my example is governed by a different rule from the one allowing semicolons in complex lists: in my example, the semicolons were present as a means to separate independent clauses from one another, not as a means to separate items in a complex list from one another.
Most folks, I think, wouldn’t consider such a sentence to be a list, unless they included a winky smiley. Veni, vidi, vici is an account of Caesar’s approach, not a grocery list of his actions. But I won’t quibble over semantics here. Mostly my point was that there’s more than one way to justify multiple semicolons.
I should note that sometimes you set off a nonrestrictive clause with commas:
The students, who smelled like fish, were carried off in nets.
If the nonrestrictive clause is complicated, you might want to set it off with semicolons:
The students; who smelled like fish, the kind of fish that you wouldn’t feed to that mean, syphilitic old cat that hangs around your office; were carried off in nets.
You’d be wrong to do that, however. Instead, you should set off that complicative nonrestrictive clause with dashes or parentheses:
The students–who smelled like fish, the kind of fish that you wouldn’t feed to that mean, syphilitic old cat that hangs around your office–were carried off in nets.
or
The students, who smelled like fish–the kind of fish that you wouldn’t feed to that mean, syphilitic old cat that hangs around your office–were carried off in nets.
You could also just leave it as an all-comma fest:
The students, who smelled like fish, the kind of fish that you wouldn’t feed to that mean, syphilitic old cat that hangs around your office, were carried off in nets.
In all cases, you’ve got the punctuation before the word “were” performing double duty: it’s ending both the nonrestrictive clause beginning with “who” and the nonrestrictive clause beginning with “the kind.”
Even though you can use semicolons to set apart items in a list when those items themselves contain commas, this isn’t a principle you can extend across the board. You can’t use semicolons to set apart a nonrestrictive clause when that clause itself contains commas, for example.
Daniel
thoroughly confusing the issue
And to add to the confusion oerhaps, but only slightly I hope…
Generally, when listing things with semi-colons a colon is used to sort of announce the list.
“Attending was : George W. Bush, the president of the US; Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK; and Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq.”
Although I would probably write that up as “In attendance were: George W. Bush, the president of the US; Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK; and Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq.”
Otto, that’s precisely wrong. Only an independent clause should precede a colon. An independent clause is a collection of words that could stand as a sentence on their own. Both of your example sentences are incorrect.
I’ll go dig up a cite for you and be back shortly.
Daniel
Just wanted to interject here that Kurt Vonnegut (the novelist) is opposed to semi-colons. He once said in an interview that the only reason to use them was to demonstrate that you’d gone to college.
I’m not saying I agree with him; I’m just sharing a point of view.
I will now parse a tiny tiny bit of a long long post for no particular reason.
You? Quibble over semantics? Never! No, really! No, go on! No, really - go on!