Word: commas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tokyo Disneyland. "I try to catch the inner stirrings of a country," he says. "Over the past year I observed the summer solstice in Iceland, attended the Wimbledon tennis matches and went to Cuba for Carnaval." Iyer, 31, can focus his attention on something as small as the comma, the subject of his essay in this week's magazine, or as vast as China, which fills a chapter of his just published travel book, Video Night in Kathmandu (Knopf...
...gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially...
Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication -- to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again. By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That...
...that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . . " and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege...
Widely admired by the writers and editors who have worked with her, Amsterdam is known as a tough and careful master who savors the process of gathering news and labors over every nuance and comma. "She is one of the most energetic and committed editors I have ever seen," says Shelby Coffey | III, who worked with Amsterdam at the Washington Post and was recently named executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. Amsterdam's detractors complain that she can be impatient, has a thin skin and gets on better with male colleagues than with female. Amsterdam is married...