Malcolm Gladwell devotes the first episode of Season 3 of his Revisionist History podcast to the significance of one semicolon in the U.S. Constitution. I doubt that the argument would hold up in court (there has to be legal precedent about how that semicolon has been interpreted over the years — right?), but it’s an interesting look at the potential impact of one errant piece of punctuation on the makeup of the Senate and our 50-state (or should it be 54-state?) union.
Further reading: