From ‘On Commas’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915:
I CAN picture the development of the misled reformer who introduced the comma into the languages of men. His laborious finger lost itself time after time among the elaborate pothooks of his generation; time after time he declared in a hissing voice that script was a fiend and time after time he led back his wandered finger to the beginning of the long crude sentence and renewed the slow chant that divinely revealed the thoughts of his distant friend. He had little access to print and was bothered with the bad writing of his many correspondents, but whether he was Jew or German or French or a rather unlikely Englishman this witness sayeth not. He came to the end of a sentence and was in the middle of the next before he realized it; adjectives tied from his interpretation and fifteen juxtaposed nouns out of a jolly earlier Rabelais puzzled him for nearly as many minutes, For years his correspondence exasperated him more and more, because being an energetic man in a generation that wrote epistles with gusto his intellectual interests and the number of his friends and consequently the volume of his letters increased yearly, till at length he arrived at old age and at a decision; he would do something to break up the intricacy of sequent words, and where a natural pause occurred or where a natural inflection of the voice was required he would place a hieroglyphic indicating that the troubled reader could gather up the threads of what was past, and prepare at that point for change or for development. So written sentences were separated and colons and commas and fullstops brought order with them.
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