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The Curious Power of Punctuation

49 points pepys 2 days ago 19 comments

noworld 1 day ago | parent

Let’s eat, Grandma.

piskov 1 day ago | parent

> what about, say, the war in Gaza?

That was not on my top-5 list of things that may be in that article.

wpollock 1 day ago | parent

Dang says tomhow is the better moderator.

Dang, says tomhow, is the better moderator.

sharts 20 hours ago | parent

English can be so imprecise.

robotresearcher 20 hours ago | parent

Those sentences are perfectly precise. Yes they are sensitive to the commas, just as they are to the whitespace and spelling.

jazzprogramming 17 hours ago | parent

- Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

- But when, Lord, when?!

- Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

- Ahhhh.

JadeNB 10 hours ago | parent

> - Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

Shouldn't this one be "Verily I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise?"

jazzprogramming 6 hours ago | parent

You're right of course, that is the grammatically correct way. I guess I was dangerously forcing my poetic license.

But it's still a good example of where a comma (or lack of) can make all the difference.

chasil 22 hours ago | parent

The play and motion picture Wit by Margaret Edson fixates on a poem by John Donne, Death be not Proud.

The fixation is on the last line of the poem:

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

The assertion is that Donne did not intend the use of a semicolon, and converting it to a comma significantly alters the meaning, profoundly uplifting the aura of spirituality.

The play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wit_(play)

The poem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Be_Not_Proud

Discussion:

https://lavelleporter.com/2015/02/13/readingwit/

"Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause."

everybodyknows 22 hours ago | parent

The author quotes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Then comments:

> I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)

A reminder of the obscurity of Fitzgerald's analogy, which is specific to the technology of sailing: A "beat" is a course that will take the boat upwind -- always a challenge. And if the current of the water is pointed downwind, perhaps impossible.

Somehow none of the New Yorker editors caught this either.

rao-v 17 hours ago | parent

This is a good catch! The choice of beat here to my ear is meant to capture both a sense of urgency (beating a drum to set the pace for rowers) and beating upwind (tacking frequently). The whole article feels a little undercooked and peevishly underinformed for the New Yorker.

Kuyawa 21 hours ago | parent

One thing I refuse to write is a period at the end of a sentence

Don't ask me why, perhaps an OCD of the many I suffer, but I don't see the point of that if a new paragraph is two lines below

And they look ugly in web pages for titles, feature blocks, testimonials, etc

AI likes to use them everywhere when building web apps. I hate that and have to go find/replace every dot next to a closing tag

I'll have to refine my skills.md "Don't end paragraphs with a period"

kstrauser 20 hours ago | parent

That sounds like an excellent idea if you primarily don't communicate with humans.

cobbzilla 19 hours ago | parent

go ask your LLM to make a browser plugin to remove all periods, then stop complaining here

Guthwine 10 hours ago | parent

I think the real question is why you are starting a new paragraph after every sentence It makes your posts read as stilted and a bit difficult to follow Do you still use question marks if you ask a question or an exclamation point Curious to what you do when you write on paper but let me know

walrus01 20 hours ago | parent

Sometimes it's the difference between helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse. Or helping your uncle jack off a horse.

N_Lens 18 hours ago | parent

I helped my Uncle, Jack, off a horse!

euroderf 13 hours ago | parent

Help! Murder! Police!

chrisweekly 11 hours ago | parent

"Let's eat, grandma!" vs "Let's eat grandma!"