Word: comma
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Before a Congressional Commission investigating land grants to the Northern Pacific R. R., one D. F. McGowan, attorney for the Forestry Service, declared that a comma in legal writing may mean as much money as a cipher on the left side of a decimal point...
Specifically, his point was that the omission of a comma in a long sentence in the Land Grant Act of 1870 enabled the Northern Pacific R. R. Co. to withhold land from settlers longer than had been intended by Congress. To support his argument, Mr. McGowan produced a letter giving a grammatical analysis of the disputed sentence, signed by Tucker Brooke (ex-Rhodes Scholar and Editor of The American Oxonian), Secretary of the English Department at Yale, and Prof. George H. Nettleton, Chairman of the Department...
Once this hostility is aroused it can be very successfully expressed as is shown in the present instance. An accidentally misplaced comma caused weeks of argument on Article X of the Versailles treaty. There is even less difficulty in stirring up trouble intentionally. Headlines can always be written to read two ways, a report can be garbled, and emphasis can be put on the wrong phrase. The result,--the product of exaggeration and misrepresentation.--will furnish sporting columns with gossip for a fortnight, but it is unlikely to accomplish anything else. The cry of "Wolf! Wolf!" has been raised...
...want it ratified. At first, the administration Senators attempted to put the document through intact, but in vain. The nation clamored for ratification. Again the Democrats tried, with mild reservations, but the Republican group, holding the whip hand, insisted that their conditions be fulfilled without the change of a comma. It was a game of the whole hog or none. Still more concessions have been made by the Democrats, until their party pride has been stretched to the limit. A substitute for article ten, of almost the identical meaning as the original Lodge reservation, has been proposed. Still the Republicans...
...word have I altered in this rhetorically perfect specimen of composition; not a comma did I take away or add. Whatever "the grounds" may be which the Echo has for "surmising," until it is kind enough to state these "grounds," in print, it has no business to "surmise." For the present, it is sufficient to say, in order to prove the true value of such "surmising," that the course referred to is Latin II., and that the instructor in question is no other than Professor Greenough. We have witnessed many rude, unpardonable assaults of injudicious hotheads upon instructors, but that...