The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1863-12-17
RuERlnnIinR,

The Dean Of Canterbury says on this sub
ject
81 remember, when | was young in print
Tag, once correcting the punctuation of a proof
sheet, and complaining Of the liberties which
had besn taken with my manuscript. The
publisher quietly answered me that punctua-
ton Wa5 left 10 the cOmpOsjtorS. And a pre-
cious mess they made Of it. The great enc
mics to understanding anything printed III
our language are the commas. And these are
inserted by the cOmpositors withoutthe slight
est conjunction on every possible occasion.
Many words are by rule always hitched off
with two commas one before and one behind
-nurSed, as the omnibus company call it
Too is one of the words boyeyer, another; a.
so, another the sense in almost every such
case being disturbed, if not destroyed by the
process. | remember beginning a sentence
with, However true this may be-" When it
came in the proof the inevitable comma was
after the however, thus of course making
nonsense Of my unfortunate sentence.
L have some satisfaction in rejecting that,
in the course Of editing tn Greek text, | be-
lieve | have destroyed more than a thousand
commas which prevented the text being prop
erly understood. One very provoking case
is that where two adjectives come together,
belonging to the Same noun-substantive.-
Thus, In printing q nice youag man,, a com
ma is placed after nice, giving as you will OBJ
serve,a very different sense from that intend
ed bringing before us the fact that q man is
both nice and young, whereas the original
sentence introduced to us a young man that
was nice. Thus too in the expression @ great
black dog, printed without commas everybody
knows what we mean but this would be
printed "a great, black dog Take again a
case where meaning is intensified by adiec-
tives being repeated-as the ride ride vorLd,
the deep dtep sea. Such expressions you
almost invariably find printed tile wids, aSide
1ortd, the doep, deep sea, thereby making
them, If judged by rule at all, absolute none
sense.
'fbtll, though too many commas are bad,
too few are not without Inconvenience also
| saw the other day a notice Of 'the Society
for Promoting the Observance Of the Lords
day which was founded in 1851 giving the
notice that the day, not the society, was found
ed in that year. Had the date been 1881, in
stead OF l8,an awkward Interpretation might
have been impossible.
"While l am upon stops, a word is uecess-
airy concerning notes Of admiration. A note
OF admiration consists, as we know, ola point
with an upright line suspended over it, strong
ly suggestive of a gentleman jumping off the
ground with amazement. These Shrisks, as
they have been called, are scattered up and
down the page by coinpositors without any
mercy. If one has written the words D sir,
as they ought to be written, viz with a plain
capital O and no stop, and then a comma af-
ter str, our friend the compositor is sure to
write Oh with a shrek @ and put another
shrek after sir. Use, in writing, as few as
possible of these nuisances. They always
make the sense weaker, where you can posi-
bly, do without them. The only case know
OF where they are really necessary is where
the language is pure exclamation, as in How
beautiful is night! OF, 0 that | might find
him"