What statement was Karl Kraus referring to with"“If all commas were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning.”?
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flo (
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June 28th, 2017
By the way that remids me of the expression:
Dot the i’s and cross the t’s (if you want to avoid snafus)
But the claim is that he was literally talking about punctuation. So what is the statement with the punctuation problem, that led to the burning of Shanghai?
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Doing a little research and reading, this quote from Wikipedia would seem to answer your interesting question:
“A concern with language was central to Kraus’s outlook, and he viewed his contemporaries’ careless use of language as symptomatic of their careless treatment of the world. Viennese composer Ernst Krenek described meeting the writer in 1932: “At a time when people were generally decrying the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai, I met Karl Kraus struggling over one of his famous comma problems. He said something like: ‘I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who were supposed to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning’.”[19]”
My wife has a much simpler version of the above on a tee shirt:
LET’S EAT GRANDMA
LET’S EAT, GRANDMA
(Commas save lives)
@flo I don’t think we know that but it isn’t significant. It sounds like he was a writer who was frequently worrying about correct grammar. It doesn’t matter at all what particular sentence he was worrying about; that’s not the point.
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