Grammar Girl here, I've been seeing the abbreviation TLDR a lot lately.

It stands for too long, didn't read.

Synodic commenters post it in response to internet articles they deem unworthy of their

time, and sometimes people use it to introduce a summary of a longer article, as in TLDR,

Colin.

Grammar Girl thinks the semicolon in TLDR is ironic.

Access GoDin wrote a blog post titled TREPED by TLDR, with a semicolon in the middle

of TLDR.

And on the media has a podcast spin-off called TLDR without a semicolon in the middle.

The urban dictionary has entries for TLDR both with and without the semicolon.

The entry without the semicolon showed up in January of 2003, and the form with the semicolon

soon followed in November of 2003.

I see the abbreviation is often with the semicolon as without, and it recently struck

me that the semicolon is ironic.

Here's why.

Cemicolons appear in long, complex sentences.

They're a hallmark of writing that would be likely to earn the TLDR label.

I can't think of another acronym or initialism that includes the semicolon, or any other

punctuation mark for that matter.

So whoever included the first semicolon in TLDR was bucking abbreviation conventions.

He or she took an abbreviation meant to endorse brevity and made it longer and more complex

by adding a semicolon.

...