Commas and Inflection Make a Difference

1895

Commas and Inflection

A Good Deal Depends on Them Sometimes

We published recently an account of a suit for heavy damages arising from lack of punctuation in a telegram. A man sent the message: "Don't come. Too late." But the doctor received it, "Don't come too late," and immediately engaged a special train to convey him a long distance.

Mr. Story, the sculptor, who began life as a lawyer, tells a good anecdote which illustrates the fact that the emphasis which punctuates has as much to do with determining the sense of a sentence as the meaning of the words. Once, when he was called upon to defend a woman accused of murdering her husband, he adduced as one of the proofs of her innocence the fact of her having attended him on his deathbed, and saying to him, when he was dying, "Goodbye, George!" The counsel for the prosecution declared that that ought rather to be taken as a proof of her guilt, and that the words she had used were "Good! by George!"

A well known clergyman of New York used to make a strong point by reading the verse, "God said, Let there be light, and there was light," with the emphasis on the word light, not on was, as usually rendered.

An elocutionist of considerable note has questioned the method of the great Mrs. Siddons, who in answer to Macbeth's suggestion of possible failure was wont to reply, "Fail!" with a emphatic drop of the voice that implied, "Well, then, fail, that's all there is to it." "Lady Macbeth would never have got him in the world," said this critic, "had she addressed him in that manner. She undoubtedly said, 'Fail,' in a tone of utter contempt for a man who could imagine such an outcome to his villainy. The word should be given in a deep tone, with a falling inflection and then an upward tendency." — Brooklyn Eagle.