Russian Czarina Maria Fyodorovna reportedly once saved the life of
a man by transposing a single comma in a warrant signed by her husband,
Alexander III (1845-1984), exiling a man to death in Siberia.
On the bottom of the warrant, the czar had written: “Pardon impossible,
to be sent to Siberia.”
The Czarina changed the punctuation so that the instructions read instead
as follows: “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.” The man was set
free.
Punctuation is usually not a matter of life and death — but it certainly
does affect the meaning of a sentence, which is the intended lesson of
this anecdote.
Note: Though the use of the comma in the Czar’s original warrant
is not correct according to the standards of contemporary American English
(which would call for a dash or a colon), it was correct according to the
conventions of the Russian language, which, like many others, allows for
looser usage of punctuation than English.
|