>Which I guess will bring me to a question: Did y'all choose your favorites based on the mark's grammatical purpose, it's visual pleasure, or by some seemingly individual criteria?

I chose the semi-colon; you see, it's my favorite punctuation mark; it's nifty and I feel smart when I use it; also, there's a Dilbert strip somewhere where an incredibly complex piece of software had to be summed up in one sentence; Dilbert turned in a five-hundred-page report without one period, remarking 'Thank God for semi-colons', or something like that; what did everyone else pick?