comma vs semicolon: We still do; living in a world in which...

[hubocfcool]

"Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century found it pleasant to escape to a time when life, though hard, was relatively simple. We still do; living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to live by." (CARL FOREMAN Virtue and a Fast Gun from The Observer)

Why use a semicolon(";") instead of a comma(",") behind "We still do"?

 

[Copyright]

I would have made it a separate sentence, but that's a personal choice.

Here, I suspect that a semicolon was used because what comes next is not any sort of list or illumination of an introductory statement, but a sentence in its own right ... especially with that summation -- "we all want a code to live by" -- at the end.

 

[eni8ma]

Semicolons can be used when the next sentence is an amplification of the first sentence.

Using a semicolon is not difficult; anyone can learn how to do it.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned, we should have had no conscience. - Thomas Carlyle


Semicolons can also be used between two contrasting statements.

I like blueberry icecream; Mary prefers strawberry.

 

[eni8ma]

Why use a semicolon(";") instead of a comma(",") behind "We still do"?

A semicolon (or full stop) is necessary because they are two separate sentences.
- We still do
- living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to live by.

To use a comma instead would have required a connecting word, such as because

We still do, because living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to live by.

However, that would make the sentence too long to understand easily.

 

[hubocfcool]

Thanks a lot!