The Curious Power of Punctuation

The play and motion picture Wit by Margaret Edson fixates on a poem by John Donne, Death be not Proud.

The fixation is on the last line of the poem:

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

The assertion is that Donne did not intend the use of a semicolon, and converting it to a comma significantly alters the meaning, profoundly uplifting the aura of spirituality.

The play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wit_(play)

The poem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Be_Not_Proud

Discussion:

https://lavelleporter.com/2015/02/13/readingwit/

"Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause."

The author quotes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Then comments:

> I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)

A reminder of the obscurity of Fitzgerald's analogy, which is specific to the technology of sailing: A "beat" is a course that will take the boat upwind -- always a challenge. And if the current of the water is pointed downwind, perhaps impossible.

Somehow none of the New Yorker editors caught this either.

Dang says tomhow is the better moderator.

Dang, says tomhow, is the better moderator.

One thing I refuse to write is a period at the end of a sentence

Don't ask me why, perhaps an OCD of the many I suffer, but I don't see the point of that if a new paragraph is two lines below

And they look ugly in web pages for titles, feature blocks, testimonials, etc

AI likes to use them everywhere when building web apps. I hate that and have to go find/replace every dot next to a closing tag

I'll have to refine my skills.md "Don't end paragraphs with a period"

> what about, say, the war in Gaza?

That was not on my top-5 list of things that may be in that article.

Let’s eat, Grandma.