Word: comma
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...warning from the National Weather Service's radar and its volunteer spotter network. "We feel there should have been some warning," said Will County Executive Charles Adelman with grim understatement. Explained NWS's Chicago meteorologist Paul Dailey: "The radar did not indicate any kind of rotation, hook or comma- shaped signal on the edge of the cloud. All we needed was one person to call us, but we didn't get a single report." The Weather Service's Washington supervisors were sending a team to find out why the killer storm's stealthy approach had not been detected...
...squeezing opinions to fit into the highly compressed space. Not surprisingly, Sachs has found critics to be "the most opinionated and creative people you'd ever want to meet. They care so much about their stories that they are ready to go to war over the change of a comma...
...scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests...
...Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane -- whom I adore -- " marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods...
What could be smaller, more negligible than a comma? And what more important than this secular god, this sign of true love...