Dear Log,
This sentence is the sentence with the worst punctuation I've even seen, while still not actually being incorrect:
Elias Canetti, in his classic book, Crowds and Power, wrote: "The baiting crowd is preserved in the newspaper-reading public, in a milder form, it is true, but, because of its distance from events, a more irresponsible one."
Yes, I do note such things. One day, when I am old and strange, I will write a three-thousand page book about commas, to bring my kookdom into full flourish. I will probably write it in TeX, so I can have frightening section numbering on my headings, like "15.3.12.3.1.1: Nonimplicit Appositive Phrases Before Complex Verbs in Garden-Path Sentences".
A book
rafael on 2002-10-05T09:03:06
The french writer Jacques Drillon has written a 500 page
Traité de la ponctuation française , which is both informative (historically and gramatically) and exhilarating.
The comma discussion rages...
htoug on 2002-10-05T16:46:06
.. here in Denmark. The national language board has, about 3 years ago, come up with yasocr (yet another set of comma rules), after the approx 10 year old attempt to get writers to change from the old german inspired stiff grammatic comma to a sligthly more relaxed anglo-inspired comma failed miserably. Nos they advocate the grammatic comma in a simplyfied form (C).
This has brought about a furious spate of flamewar, so furoius that even p5p in older days was a mild and kind place
;-)
I find the fuss amusing - especially as I just can't place commas right in any language after any system! But it is enjoyable to read people flaming each other about how to place this little punctuationmark - knowing that when the fuss has died down, everybody will be back to normal - commas will be places haphazardly, wrongly, and just about as well as I can - and the flamers will have gone on to something equally important like which new spelling to add to the official dictionary.
Isn't life just fun?
