3 ms·

I remember this story and the only (personal preference) issue I can take with it were the comma placements. Yikes. Shatner anyone?

• SNACKeR99 10y ago
  I think the commas very well placed. If it reads like Shatner to you, then perhaps you are reading as if they were ellipses?
• Veen 10y ago
  Commas have two roles: syntactic and prosodic. Today, we almost always use them to indicate syntax: separating subclauses etc. In the nineteenth century, they were commonly used to indicate prosody — breathing pauses and the intended rhythm of the sentence — which leads to comma placements that seem odd to modern eyes but would have been perfectly normal to a nineteenth-century reader. If you read any Jane Austen, George Eliot, or other Victorian writers, you'll see that sort of usage everywhere: > "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."