Thursday, February 15, 2018

Woman & Man

Yesterday's hike in the red rose and heart-filled card market has receded for another year. With Valentine's core idea still in mind, here's something I came across the other day:

"A woman without her man is nothing."

Huh? Not exactly!

This example of what a little colon and comma can do has made the rounds on the internet for a while now. Never mind, it hasn't seen the light of day here, so -

As the story goes, a professor told his class to correctly punctuate the sentence.

The males in the classroom wrote:
“A woman, without her man, is nothing.”

The women in the class wrote:
“A woman: without her, man is nothing.”
With just a simple change in punctuation, the entire meaning of the sentence was changed in an instant.

6 comments:

A Casual Reader said...

Unless either of them is gay, which would leave both of them diminished and wasting their time no matter how many colons or commas are used.

Twilight said...

A Casual Reader ~ Just so! I wonder what a gay student, of either gender would have written? Or the couple you envisaged, who were mis-matched. Probably something along the lines of: "Take your flippin' commas and colons and stick 'em where the sun don't shine!" ;-)

anyjazz said...

Ah. Punctuation. Where would we be without it? In a message on a cell phone probably.

Twilight said...

anyjazz ~ Exactly! Or tweeting in Twitterland.

Wisewebwoman said...

I've always preferred this version:

A woman without; her man is nothing.

XO
WWW

Twilight said...

Wisewebwoman ~ That's a subtle one, WWW - sounds a tad Shakespearean. :)