Word: commas
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...report of the committee of the Imperial Conference on in ter-imperial relations is a masterpiece of evasion. It has recom mended the elimination of five words and the insertion of one comma in the royal title (TIME, Nov. 29), and it advises a few changes of formalities and formulae. But it has avoided with the greatest skill every real problem that arises...
...literary criticism, whose "Two figures of Earth" in a recent number of the Yale Review is stimulating in the vastness of its concept, in the directness of its approach. He spends classroom hours expounding the benefits to be derived from an accurate appreciation of Gray's use of he comma. The third class embraces such men as Bliss Perry, formerly editor of the "Atlantic", who in his fear of being less the scholar for being more the teacher does a forensic tightrope act between vitality and the verbal norm. None of these three classes apparently dares give to the undergraduate...
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...
...Indeed, as a breeder of litigation, commas may be compared to the countless wigglers that in our youth we watched coming up to breathe in the family rainbarrel. To carry the simile one step further, it [the comma] should be abolished...