![]() Other ‘operative.’ On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about ‘the Invalidating the District of Columbia’s gun ban (subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court) held that “the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one ‘prefatory’ and the As Adam Freedman wrote in this newspaper in 2007, a Federal District Court ruling Hurt, confusion and argumentation over the last 223 years. The one after “state” would be used today the one after “arms” would not the one after “militia” is ambiguous and all three have caused a world of You can glimpse a reason for this codification - which emphasized consistency rather than sound - by looking at the opening of the Second Amendment of the Constitution (1789):Ī well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”īy about a century later, comma rules had been codified such that both commas in the sentence (after “acknowledged” and “fortune”) would be dispensed with. So in the first line of “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), Jane Austen wrote: They felt like it, which was usually when a natural pause seemed to occur. In the 19th century and earlier (when rules were generally more lax than they are today), comma use was pretty much a crapshoot. Historically, and the comma shows this clearly. As I said, what’s right and wrong changes I’ll start with the latter because the protocol for comma use is so complicated and contingent. ![]() The two big players in the field are the period and the comma. ![]() And as Truss didn’t adequately acknowledge, even the Maybe more than any other element of writing, punctuation combines rules with issues of sound, preference and personal style. Although Truss’s focus on errors drew the ire, if not the fire, of grammarians, linguists and other “descriptivists,” her book was, for the most part, harmless and legitimate. Is it safe to talk about punctuation again? Eight years ago, Lynne Truss’s best-selling “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” took, in the words of her subtitle, a “Zero Tolerance Approach” Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. ![]()
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