| The deadly comma | ![]() | ||
| Re: Re: Hippocrates would agree with the court -- Lamplighter | Post Reply | ![]() |
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Posted by: crossbowman 04/25/2007, 17:35:25 (About author)
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Can't resist. Please forgive. A comma is a most interesting thing. Add it here, you say one thing. Delete it there, you say another thing entirely. For example: "Democrats who hate the war oppose the President's plan."
In the first instance a subset of Democrats opposes the plan, and dropping the descriptive phrase would significantly alter the meaning of the sentence. In the second ALL Democrats do, and the off-set phrase is simply describing them all (and could be dropped without changing the basic meaning). Here we have an interesting case: "Adult human beings, who are willing to 'eat their unborn' for the sake of convenience, does not bode well for the survival of this experiment in the cosmos!" In this case, the commas do a most interesting thing. They turn a phrase intended (I hope) to identify a subclass of "Adult human beings" (those "who are willing to 'eat their unborn'"...) into a description of ALL "Adult human beings". Anyone hungry?
Life gives you two choices:
you can laugh, or you can cry.
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