Headless Charles -- Comma, the silent killer -- case file 01

Punctuation was invented to work like traffic signs for language so that regardless of the presence of the writer, the written text could be read and construed according to the meaning meant by the writer of the text.

There are many members in the punctuation marks (I tend to see the marks as little living things, faithfully executing their function), and I think comma is quite a tricky one. Against its tiny quiet appearance, the presence or the absence of the comma can be a killer to the sense of the text.

I was a 4th grader in primary school in Australia sitting in an English class. Our teacher wrote on the board this sentence.

"Charles the First walked and talked five minutes after his head was chopped off."

From my very early childhood, I loved imagining, assembling pictures in my mind, and of course, from the sentence, I was imagining in detail how a person five minutes after his decapitation would walk and talk. In my surreal imagination world, a headless person walking and talking was perfectly possible, and who knows, there could have been some kind of magic used in the 17th century England.

Our teacher asked us,
"Now, don't you think this sentence is funny?"

I thought,
"Oh yes, it is certainly funny. Charles 1st would bump into things if he walked, and if he talked he would have to use sign language or some other organ to get his voice out."

But then, the teacher added a comma to the sentence:
"Charles the First walked and talked, five minutes after his head was chopped off."

The comma pulled me back to the real world; pulled me five minutes before the beheading.

At 4th grade, I realized what how lethal comma was. Its presence can keep us in the real world, its absence lets us dive into the surreal.

Personally, I prefer the surreal.