WASHINGTON -- The actress Margaret Anglin left this note in the dressing room of another actress: ``Margaret Anglin says Mrs. Fiske is the best actress in America.'' Mrs. Fiske added two commas and returned the note: ``Margaret Anglin, says Mrs. Fiske, is the best actress in America.''
Little things mean a lot. That is the thesis of a wise and witty wee book, ``Eats, Shoots & Leaves,'' just published by Lynne Truss, a British writer and broadcaster. She knows that proper punctuation, ``the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape,'' is ``both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.''
The book's title comes from a joke: A panda enters a cafe, orders a sandwich, eats, draws a pistol, fires a few shots, then heads for the door. Asked by a waiter to explain his behavior, he hands the waiter a badly punctuated wildlife manual and says: ``I'm a panda. Look it up.'' The waiter reads the relevant entry: ``Panda: large black-and-white bear-like mammal. Eats, shoots and leaves.''
Behold the magical comma. It can turn an unjust aspersion against an entire species (``No dogs please'') into a reasonable request (``No dogs, please''), or it can turn a lilting lyric into a banal inquiry (``What is this thing called, love?''). The Christmas carol actually is ``God rest ye merry, gentlemen,'' not ``God rest ye, merry gentlemen.''
Huge doctrinal consequences flow from the placing of a comma in what Jesus, when on the cross, said to the thief: ``Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise'' or ``Verily, I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.'' The former leaves little room for Purgatory.
Combined with a colon, a comma can fuel sexual warfare: ``A woman without her man is nothing'' becomes ``A woman: without her, man is nothing.'' But a colon in place of a comma can subtly emit a certain bark.
``President Bush said, 'Get Bob Woodward.'''
``President Bush said: 'Get Bob Woodward.'''
But beware the derangement known as commaphilia, which results in the promiscuous cluttering of sentences with superfluous signals. A reader once asked James Thurber why he had put a comma after the word ``dinner'' in this sentence: ``After dinner, the men went into the living room.'' Thurber, a comma minimalist, blamed the New Yorker's commaphilic editor, Harold Ross: ``This particular comma was Ross' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.''