A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

A MAN IS ONLY AS GOOD AS HIS TOOLS Because we missed it yesterday was per Matt National Punctuation Day a day worth celebrating here I commend to you Nicholson Bakers musings on the comma from Room Temperature

The idea of the comma as an oasis of respiration, a point of real as opposed to grammatical breath, of momentary renewal and self-marshaling in the dotty onslaught of sixteenth notes, overlaid itself on my idea of the comma as a unit of simple disjunction in written English. How had we come up with this civilized shape? I wondered. Timidly and respectfully it cupped the sense of a preceding phrase and held it out to us. ... [T]here was an implied high culture in its asymmetrical tapering swerve that gave it a distinct superiority over the Euclidian austerity of the full point, or period. You might in fact have expected these two elements of disjunction to exhibit reversed functions: the comma seems more of a foil to the progress of the eye, a fallen branch partially impeding a stream, while the period, a mere dot, a small cold pebble, should allow sense to slip smoothly past. But perhaps the functions were as they were, I thought, because the graceful purling motion necessary to the creation of the comma, that inclusive flip of the pen, is similar to the motions we use in writing the prose that surrounds it, while the period is an alien jab, tacking the sentence with finality onto the paper. Even after Aldus Manutius put his typecasters to work, and they resolved the informal kinetics of its written formation into theoretically sound protractor-twirls and conic sections, the comma still retained all its original expressiveness, miming the extenuating dips of the hand we use when taking exception to a point in polite conversation. And in those recent typefaces in which commas have been chamfered into little more than rude cuneiformal wedges, their newer shape nonethless manages at least to evoke the rubber doorstop's dependable amenity, keeping the ostioles free from clause to clause, allowing metaphors to mix more freely. Working myself up into a state of reverence as I lay there, I began to be curious whether the statistical ratio of commas to sentences might have a predictive use in some sort of moral stylometrics: maybe, as a general rule, the fewer commas a person used, the more ruthless a tyrant he would prove to be if placed in a position of power.