Fun_People Archive
31 Jan
QOTD - Woman without her man is a savage!

Date: Wed, 31 Jan 96 17:04:37 -0800
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: QOTD - Woman without her man is a savage!

Ask the members of the group to provide any punctuation necessary to the
following seven-word sentence: "Woman without her man is a savage." The
average male chauvinist will quickly respond that the sentence needs no
punctuation, and he is correct.  There will be a few pedants among the male
chauvinists who will place balancing commas around the prepositional phrase:
"Woman, without her man, is a savage." Grammatically, this is also correct.
A feminist, however, and an occasional liberated man, will place a dash
after "woman" and a comma after "her."  Then we have "Woman--without her,
man is a savage."

	--Robert A. Day
	From: How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper
		(Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1988), p.164
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