The Curious Power of Punctuation | Hacker News Reader

The Curious Power of Punctuation

newyorker.com

49 pointspepys19 comments

The play and motion picture Wit by Margaret Edson fixates on a poem by John Donne, Death be not Proud.

The fixation is on the last line of the poem:

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

The assertion is that Donne did not intend the use of a semicolon, and converting it to a comma significantly alters the meaning, profoundly uplifting the aura of spirituality.

The play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wit_(play)

The poem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Be_Not_Proud

Discussion:

https://lavelleporter.com/2015/02/13/readingwit/

"Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause."

The author quotes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Then comments:

> I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)

A reminder of the obscurity of Fitzgerald's analogy, which is specific to the technology of sailing: A "beat" is a course that will take the boat upwind -- always a challenge. And if the current of the water is pointed downwind, perhaps impossible.

Somehow none of the New Yorker editors caught this either.

This is a good catch! The choice of beat here to my ear is meant to capture both a sense of urgency (beating a drum to set the pace for rowers) and beating upwind (tacking frequently). The whole article feels a little undercooked and peevishly underinformed for the New Yorker.

Dang says tomhow is the better moderator.

Dang, says tomhow, is the better moderator.

English can be so imprecise.

Those sentences are perfectly precise. Yes they are sensitive to the commas, just as they are to the whitespace and spelling.

- Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

- But when, Lord, when?!

- Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

- Ahhhh.

> - Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

Shouldn't this one be "Verily I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise?"

You're right of course, that is the grammatically correct way. I guess I was dangerously forcing my poetic license.

But it's still a good example of where a comma (or lack of) can make all the difference.

> what about, say, the war in Gaza?

That was not on my top-5 list of things that may be in that article.

Sometimes it's the difference between helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse. Or helping your uncle jack off a horse.

I helped my Uncle, Jack, off a horse!

Let’s eat, Grandma.

"Let's eat, grandma!" vs "Let's eat grandma!"

Help! Murder! Police!

One thing I refuse to write is a period at the end of a sentence

Don't ask me why, perhaps an OCD of the many I suffer, but I don't see the point of that if a new paragraph is two lines below

And they look ugly in web pages for titles, feature blocks, testimonials, etc

AI likes to use them everywhere when building web apps. I hate that and have to go find/replace every dot next to a closing tag

I'll have to refine my skills.md "Don't end paragraphs with a period"

That sounds like an excellent idea if you primarily don't communicate with humans.

go ask your LLM to make a browser plugin to remove all periods, then stop complaining here

I think the real question is why you are starting a new paragraph after every sentence It makes your posts read as stilted and a bit difficult to follow Do you still use question marks if you ask a question or an exclamation point Curious to what you do when you write on paper but let me know

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