My pal Roberto is back from Europe.
In the course of conversation, he mentioned Portuguese has two verbs for temporary and permanent states.
His name IS Roberto.
His job *is (for now)* data entry.
Nice.
Anyway, the French/ Esperanto method to express possession is informative.
My French sux ass.
Le gateau de la femme.
Le gateus du (le le) homme.
Esperanto uses a similar mechanism without the masculine condensed approach.
What if... you used a consonant cluster in a designated part of the word to denote this invisible punctuation trick in English?
The cake of the woman.
The cake of the man.
The cake of the women/men.
The woman's cake.
Hmm.
Globe and Mail this Saturday, page A3.
Can YOU find the punctuation fail?
That spoiled my morning.
Yup, you guessed it - comma retardation.
Second only to apostrophe retardation.
So what happpened here?
Confusion.
One does need 2 commas IF one is indicating a description that delineates only a sole subject.
The dog, which lived in the doghouse on the hill, ...
THIS is not an example of this.
Please please please, somebody fire this journalist.
Then find the editors that let it slip through.
Along with the largely lackluster writing.
The Focus section made up for it, I guess.
Here's a hint.
If there should be a pause in spoken English, then there should likely be some punctuation there in written form.
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