Friday, August 29, 2014

Ode to the uncommon comma


There's no abasement
in quibbling over placement
of a comma,
even if yo' momma
(or Lynn Truss,
who must
be disgus-
ted with us)
taught you the rules.
You're not a fool
just because you want to color outside the lines
sometimes.
Intelligent people
can be deepl-
y divided
(in often one-sided
conversations)
over punctuation.
So skip the drama
and place the comma
(on purpose, not by accident)
where it's meant
to be.
And if we
disagree
every once in a while,
we'll do it with style.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wondered why the French "virgule" and "comma" are so different. Comma comes from Greek rhetoric, "a phrase or group of words less than a colon." A virgule was a line in a medieval mss, used to indicate a line break.

D.