THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COMMA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6131, 18 March 1898, Page 3

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COMMA.

(Tit Bibs.) The comma seems to be a very insignificant thing in a sentence, but it is, nevertheless, of great importance. : A Government department has recently shown the value they place npon it. In a certain declaration, a comma had been omitted between the words " Havana " and "Cuba," and the department in question actually proposed that the declaration should be returned to Cuba, in order that the missing comma might be inserted. Of course, there seems to be- some of the proverbial red-tape "about thio transaction ; but in many cases the omission of a comma leads to somewhat peculiar results. Only the other day a house was advertised as containing "eight rooms with a good garden," and theue- are many advertisements on a par with. this. A comma would have made all th& difference in that describing the grand piano r " the property of a lady about to travel in a walnut case with carved legs," and likewise in that one where a lady wanted "a husband with a Roman nose having strong religious tendencies." Similarly it wonld have improved the statement about the horse "calculated for a charger,, or would carry a*. lady- with a, switch tail," and' also; the advertisement of the "mail phaeton, the property of a gentleman with a movable head." Its unmistakable importance, however, was brought prominently forward in a contract for lighting Liverpool, entered into early in the present century. The sentence which presented the difficulty was the following: "The lamps- to> be in number 4050, of two spouts each,, composed of twenty threads of cotton." Of course the contractor was going to supply each lamp with the twenty threads,, on the strength of the agveement, but this was only half the quantity the authorities required. The commissioner then found that the difference was caused by the comma following, instead of preceding, as it ought to have done i to answer their purpose, the word " each." In the end the contract was annulled to prevent a law-suit. A somewhat similar case was dealt with in Parliament in the year 1817. A report respecting certain political clubs was made to the House of Lords by a committee of that House, but a secretary of one of the clubs subsequently presented a petition offering to prove at the Bar that a portion of the report was totally untrue. This naturally made their lordships very indignant, but on closer investigation they must have found themselves to be in the wrong, for the Chairman of the Committee afterwards, apologised for the report, and stated that a comma had been placed where there ought to have been a full-stop. This little mistake, therefore, " made that false which would otherwise have been, and which was intended to be, true." Dr Johnson says, in the " Life of Lord Lyttelton," that his "History of Henry the Second " cost some hundreds of pounds to punctuate. The author would not trust his printer, but employed a man named Reid to do the work. The result was disappointing, for the punctuating would have been done as well, if not better, by the printer for nothing. Eichard Dawes, however, trusted the printer ot his " Miscellanea Critica," but unfortunately that gentleman inserted a comma in a passage of " Terentianus Mauruß," quoted by Dawes in order to correct it, which quite destroyed the merit of the emendation. In an addenda, subsequently published, the author expressed great indignation, and stated that he could not conjecture what fault he had committed against the printer that he should envy him the honour due to his correction! Strange to t- \\ the tombstone erected to the memory i r Dawes described him as "late headmaster of the Grammar School, Newcastle," and if the displacement of a comma so distressed him, one cannot help wondering what the bad orthography would have done.

In Burma, when a man meets a woman, he puts his nose and his month close to her cheek and draws a long breath, as if inhaling a delicious perfume. He does not kiss her cheek, strange to say. A man is greeted in exactly the same way. In the greater part of Germany it is considered , an act of politeness, not of gallantry, for a man to kiss a woman's hand. In Italy that privilege is allowed only to near relatives, while in Russia it is extended to kissing I the forehead.