TRICKY COMMA

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18441, 6 December 1929, Page 13

TRICKY COMMA

ONE THAT COST £400,000., Nowadays considerable,stress in lain upon punctuation, and examiners are keen in ascertaining whether students me properly equipped in this respect. In fact, a recent examination paper contained the lines: — Every lady in the land Has twenty nails upon each hand Five and twenty on hands and feet This is true without deceit, for the meaning to be shown by punctuation. Evidently due attention was not paid to this subject formerly, or \i would not' have been necessary for Lord Lyttelton to pay some hundreds of pounds for the punctuation of his “History of Henry the Second.” Dr Johnson states that he would not trust the printer, but employed a man who professed to be an expert, and yet. notwithstanding this great outlay, the work was badly done. The Printer’s Duty. Printers must have taken on this duty in the past, for we find Lord Jeffrey, the Edinburgh reviewer, beseeching his printer not to “sprinkle his pepper-box full of commas” too generously over his work. This promiscuous sprinkling is responsible for some peculiar mistakes. An Irish advertiser, for instance, required “A country girl to wash and ilk one cow,” while another paper offered “A good stylish bicycle, £lO fw sale, by a young lady enamelled blr ck and geared to sixty-eight “

The United States suffered heavily through the wrongful placing of a

comma some years ago. The Congress drafted a Tariff Bill, and in enumerating the articles to be admitted free included “all foreign fruit-plants.” When copying however, the cler-v omitted the hyphen, and placed a comma after fruit, so that the clause read, “all foreign fruit, plants, etc.” As the matter could not be rectified for about a year all kinds of foreign fruits, such as lemons, oranges, grapes, bananas, and others, entered dutv free, and the Government lost at least £400,000 A Liverpool Blunder. Liverpool has also had an experience of the value of the comma. In 1819 a contract was entered into for lighting the then town which read. “The lamps to be in number 4050. of two spouts each, composed of twenty threads of but when the contractor proceeded to comply with this it was found that the comma should have preceded, and not followed, the word each. The intention was that each spout should contain twenty threads, but as this was not contractor’s idea of his obligation the contract was cancelled in order to avoid a lawsuit. The omission of a comma gave rise to a court case a few years ago. An address plate had been prepared, and as a comma had been left out after the figure 1 the purchaser refused to pay the account. The judge, however, clid not think the comma was essential, and therefore directed that the engraver should be pa|d.