I noticed a post by Michael on the humble comma: The Sad Fate of the Comma. This morning in reading the book of 1 Timothy (NIV). I found a lot of areas where commas made a big difference in how you interpret a passage:
For example 1 Timothy 1:5 can be interpreted like this:
The goal of this command is love which comes from [a pure heart] and [a good conscience] and [a sincere faith].
It could also be this way:
The goal of this command is [love which comes from a pure heart] and [a good conscience] and [a sincere faith].
So which is it?
My most recent Grasshopper Greek post talked about commas as well.
By the way, I wrote this post with only one comma.
3 responses so far ↓
Friday Round-Up (08-03-2007) | Withering Fig // August 4, 2007 at 12:03 am
[...] gets calm. Friends find me odd because I’m excited about footnotes and the history of punctuation and [...]
dougchaplin // August 4, 2007 at 12:28 am
You did indeed write this post with only one comma, but to be grammatical you should have used two! Your second sentence should have one instead of a full-stop after “(NIV)”. Maybe that’s just bad karma
lingamish // August 4, 2007 at 6:29 am
Caught me. That’s what I get for writing posts late at night.
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