The Omission of a Comma.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 229, 19 November 1887, Page 3

The Omission of a Comma.

Some years ago the omission of a comma in a letter in the London Times gave a horrible meaning to a sentence. The letter was on the American w,ar, and the writer said : ' The loss of life will hardly fall short of a quarter of a million ; and how many more were better with the dead than doomed to crawl on the mutilated victims of this great national crime.' It should have been : ' Than doomed to crawl on, the mutilated victims of this great national crime.' The following sentence appeared in a newspaper a short time ago : * The prisoner said the witness was a convicted thief.' This statement nearly caused the proprietors of the newspaper some trouble, and yet the words ' were correct. When their attention was drawn to the matter, and proper punctuation supplied, the sentence had an exactly opposite meaning : c The prisoner, said the witness, was a convicted thief.' Dean Alford says that he saw an announcement of a meeting in connection with the * Society for Promoting the Observance of the Lord's Day which was founded in 1531,' giving the notion that the day, not the society, was founded in that year; A comma, should have been after * day,' and then the sentence would have been correct.