Linguist John
McWhorter, an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, U S A, has suggested that
comma could be abolished as a punctuation mark without much damage to the
language. He believes that comma is used as just by a convention and as a
fashion. The good Professor says that internet users and some writers have
become indifferent about use of this punctuation mark and hence comma can be
treated as past its expiry date!
The late Gertrude
Stein, the American novelist, says that a comma enfeebles, distracts and
annoyingly dilutes what must be intense.
Oscar Wilde
delighted many by confessing that he had spent most of a day putting in a comma
and the rest of the day taking it out!
So much so that
The Times of India recently carried a full second editorial without using a
single comma!!
However, the
renowned author Pico Iyer firmly believes in the power of pause which is
provided by a comma. He has written a memorable essay, ‘In Praise of the Humble
Comma’.
In this essay,
Pico Iyer says that comma is like God’s gift of breath to us. Comma gives the
mind, “quite literally, a pause to think”. It gives the mind, a resting place,
he says.
To quote him,
“Punctuation marks are road signs placed along the highway of our communication
– to control speeds, provide directions and to prevent head-on collisions.
Comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down.” Punctuation tells us when to rest, when to
raise one’s voice.” It is the way one bats one’s eye-lids, lowers one’s voice,
or blushes demurely.”
Iyer further says
- When V S Naipal writes, “He was a middle-aged man, with glasses”, the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it
gives the description a spin as well as subtlety that it otherwise lacks, and
it shows that glasses are not part of the middle-agedness, but something else.”
Aiyer adds, “ Punctuation is a matter of care, care for
words, yes, but also, the more important , for what the words imply. Only a
lover notices the small things, the way the afternoon light catches the nape of
the neck; or how a strand of hair slips out from behind the ear, or the way a
finger curls around a cup.” For him, this little mark is actually about
love.
In an interview published in The Times of
India of 14.02.2014, Iyer says that we need the comma now more than ever before
especially the traffic has increased so dramatically in every sense.
So, is there going
to be a full stop for comma in the modern days of SMS and texts where the most
important need is of saving time by using collapsible words like ‘wrds’,
‘txt’ and ‘gr8’or even ‘u’ (for ‘you’)
and ‘r’ (for ‘are’)?
