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The moving cat sheds, and, having shed, moves on.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Positively comma-tose. 

I know I'm a little sad for doing this, but I did it anyway.

I like punctuation. I can't disguise the fact, and I won't deny it, either. I really enjoyed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, often finding myself nodding in agreement with Lynne Truss, the author. How dare they leave out that apostrophe? Terrible abuse of a colon! That poor question mark, his role built up and up and up and up, only to be cruelly left off when his moment came. And so on.

Anyway, to the point: I like punctuation. I really like punctuation. It's like an obsession. If one can slip some punctuation in, then, gosh darn it, do so! Nested commas, especially. Ooh, and semi-colons. And! And! Colons, oh yeah baby. But it's nested commas I want to bring to your attention. We all know what a comma is, of course. I used one in the last sentence, and in this one, too. In fact, I used two in that sentence, and two in this one as well. But what, you may ask, are nested commas? Well, I just used two commas in that last sentence (the one ending with a question mark - easy punctuation to use, yet still people get it wrong sometimes), and they were holding a few words that could easily be removed from the sentence without damaging it: it'd still make sense. If I did that several times over in a sentence, with each group of words, like this, contained inside another group of words, then that would be an example of nested commas. Did you see what I did there?

I built a sentence purely for the love of building a sentence with nested commas in it, often with only one word between one comma and the next. Here is the beauty:

Terence, who, when scared, such as now, would usually, if given the opportunity, run, decided, instead, to stay.

Isn't it gorgeous? And it's immune to the critical eye of other punctuation-geeks. We can easily remove a segment, one at a time...

Terence, who, when scared, would usually, if given the opportunity, run, decided, instead, to stay.
Terence, who would usually, if given the opportunity, run, decided, instead, to stay.
Terence, who would usually run, decided, instead, to stay.
Terence, who would usually run, decided to stay.

...until we get to the most basic form of the sentence. It has no commas at all (poor impoverished thing), and it's easy to read and understand, but it's missing a lot of details. Why has he decided to stay? Why does it merit a mention? Here it is:

Terence decided to stay.

Mmm. I have to go and have a cold shower now.

PS: Who is Terence?
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