Semicolons; So Tricky

I just can't get over the recent slew of articles on the most-feared of all punctuation marks. This from Mary Norris' post at Page Turner:

In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.

Previous post on semicolons here.