This is mundane and pointless, but it made me laugh, so here it is.
Sitting in my English class this evening, I was listening to my teacher lecture about common mistakes made in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. She’s talking about the whole “eats, shoots, and leaves” joke, and then says something that ends with “. . . and that’s why God created commas.”
A girl on the other side of the room suddenly piped up and informed the professor that she couldn’t say things like that in a public school, God had no place in a public college, etc.
She was serious. :eek:
I’m all for separation of church & state, as well as the removal of “under God” from the pledge, but this is a bit overreacting. (It’s obviously being used as a figure of speech, not a literal endorsement of any deity.)
And on the eighth day, The Lord created the comma, and all the punctuation that lives and breathes in the languages, and behold, it was very good.
But Eve did partake of the forbidden fruit, and thus it came to be that the comma was used for evil and not for good, and English teachers everywhere were cursed.
what? It’s in my Bible! I have the unabridged version!
I thought the story was that the inventor of the comma traveled far and wide and spread his creation in many different lands and cultures simultaneously, but because he wanted the device to be a gift to humankind and didn’t want any personal credit to accrue to himself he used a variety of names and costumes to conceal his identity.
You’ve heard of him. He’s known as the Comma Chameleon.
She didn’t even blink. She looked at the girl and said, “I’m sorry. Forgive me.” She then went on with the lecture as if nothing had ever happened. I thought it was handled well, and appropriately dismissed.
