[pasabagi]

It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth.

I think the problem with semicolons is twofold:

1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere).

2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that.

For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.