@DamkerngT. Did you know the story?

@DamkerngT. Well, it became less clear hundreds of years ago when English punctuation moved to a more structural role.

See Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West for a history.

(Terribly hard to find that book, though . . . )

amazon.com/Pause-Effect-Punctuation-M-Parkes/dp/0520079418

Well, as you know, punctuation isn't a language universal. Many languages are never written down in the first place :-)

Punctuation started as a way to indicate pauses, intonation, and the like.

Comma? Pause. Question mark? Rising intonation.

That simple.

People teach that it's still that simple, but they're dead wrong.

It hasn't been for a long time.

One problem in describing punctuation, though, is the large amount of variation between writers in punctuation use. And not just between writers, but across time as well.

We don't use punctuation the same way we did 100 years ago, and they didn't use it then the same way they did 200 years ago.

If you read older written English, you might find some of the punctuation rather confusing!

For example, in English today we have a convention: with few exceptions, do not put a comma between a verb and its subject.

But two hundred years ago that was not the convention.

Is that because we never pause between subject and verb today, but we did back then? It seems unlikely.

For one thing, the exceptional cases where we do write a comma in that position today don't necessarily correspond to pauses.

And for another, I find I can pause between subject and verb in this sentence, but I'd never write a comma there.

The naive transcriptionist view doesn't work.

@DamkerngT. There's a lot of variability, though, as you were explaining earlier. Commas some people prefer to use, but others prefer not to.

Me, I'm an inveterate comma over-inserter :-( I put commas in places they probably shouldn't go when I'm typing. When I'm editing, I always end up removing commas.

I've been trying to get better about it, but it's hard to break those habits :-)

Still, there's a lot of room for a "heavy" punctuation style if that's what you want. Today, "light" styles are more popular.

People tend to use less punctuation.

What's interesting is that there are a lot of commas most people would agree should be there, and other commas few people would put there, but there's a large range in between where it's not so clear.

For example, in very short coordinations, people tend not to use commas. And in very long coordination, people tend to use commas.

People seem to dislike very high or very low comma density.

@DamkerngT. If you look, a lot of different publications have their own styles, and they often stick to mechanical punctuation conventions whether they make things easier to understand or not.

@DamkerngT. I like in :-)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1311

An example of why choosing not to use optional commas might not always be the best idea :-)

The best rule is to use optional commas if they make things easier to read and understand.

But unfortunately, that rule on its own doesn't give you any answers – you have to think about it and decide! :-)

I'm not consistent about it.

I tend to include the comma, though.

Like I said, I tend to add lots of commas :-)

@DamkerngT. I agree!

I haven't.

Hmm . . .

I think this question spans both English and non-English topics.

Oh!

Which post did you mean? :-)

Oh, I see. Dupbot!

I do think it's difficult to find duplicates on ELL sometimes.

Tags could be useful for that, in theory.

The community is split, though. Some people dislike specific, useful tags. Some people dislike general tags.

But most people just don't care one way or the other!

Do people get routine blood tests now and then in Thailand?

Not everyone in the U.S. gets routine blood tests, but I think they're a good thing because they can catch conditions before they do damage to the body.

I've been told routine blood testing is rare in some countries, but I don't know what countries those are.

Maybe the answer is most countries!

Our health care is expensive. Right now my insurance is spending $3000/month on me!

It turns out, it's possible to have iron overload and iron deficiency anemia at the same time. Darn my Irish genes!

It doesn't make sense if you consider "iron" to be a scalar variable which is either low, high, or in range.

But it's more complicated than that.

I have genetic hemochromatosis, which is more serious in males than in females, but my serum ferritin has still managed to become somewhat elevated.

It's a particularly common mutation among the Irish.

As I understand it, it's quite rare among Asians.

Oh, no, actually, I eat gluten :-)

My housemate is gluten-free.

She doesn't have celiac, though.

You'd think I'd be able to remember capitalization rules in English by now, but sometimes I can't :-)

Hemochromatosis is like diabetes in that the body can't produce a hormone, but in this case it's hepcidin rather than insulin, and they can't make synthetic hepcidin, so they can't treat it the same way they treat diabetes. So the only way to treat it (more or less) is to take blood.

But my hospital can use the blood to help people :-)

So I'm going to be giving blood on a regular basis for a while.

Apparently some hospitals have to throw away the blood for some reason.

@DamkerngT. Yeah, they can use it like a donation :-) My blood is okay.

So I get blood tests every two weeks. Much more often than most people.

A blood test takes a very small amount, like a few vials each time.

They have to take more than one vial because they do several tests.

Oh, that'd be nice! You know, I have a blood glucose testing thingy. It was super cheap.

I don't use it very often though because I have very well controlled blood sugar. It's always perfect.

But I'm at increased risk for getting diabetes eventually.

amazon.com/TRUEResult-Blood-Glucose-Starter-Kit/dp/B002CGT08S

I got this when it was listed on Amazon for $1.73 :-)

I'm not really worried about my blood sugar, but I got it because my friend is diabetic and it kind of felt like it was nice to both have to go through the same finger-stick thing, if that makes sense? :-)

Like some form of finger-sticking solidarity.

Oh god, it's so not fun :-)

It's not too bad, though.

They're working on technology to measure blood glucose levels through the skin. They make some meters like that, but I looked into it and it seems like they're both expensive and inaccurate right now :-(

Thesis topic: On the unified semantics of the emotive–sympathetic interjection 'Aww'

@DamkerngT. Well, it is sad that in 2016 we still treat hemochromatosis by bloodletting.

Or fleaming, if you will.

You fleam with a fleam!

Although they don't actually use one of those.

It's just fun to say fleam.

It's cognate with phlebotomy.

Yes, fleam rhymes with gleam.

What's that? I haven't heard it before.

Is that like ghosting?

Oh, it's different.

Ghosting is when you snub someone by ignoring their texts / calls.

I don't like phone snubbing. It sounds like it should mean the same thing as ghosting, but it doesn't.

By the way, I don't really have a reason to check my blood sugar myself since I'm getting blood tests so often, and they include blood glucose :-)

Hah!

It's okay, my insurance pays for everything. I'm glad to make them pay as much as possible.

American insurance companies are evil.

Well, they're evil, but I'm lucky to have them anyway, I guess :-)

@DamkerngT. You mean in case of Trumpocalypse?

@skillpatrol That is interesting. They're both usually pretty good, although I tend to check Oxford more.

The "Oxford Dictionaries" website has as its main dictionary the Oxford Dictionary of English, along with its American version, the New Oxford American Dictionary. It's a very large single-volume dictionary of Modern English, not to be confused with the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), a large multi-volume dictionary of historical English.

I find that the ODE is actually a rather good dictionary for what it is, although of course it doesn't contain the same sort of information as the OED, so I try to remind people that they're distinct things.

Ew has an entry as an interjection in the OED.

As does ow.

It's good to memorize lists of two-letter words if you play Scrabble :-)

Qi comes up all the time in Scrabble!

In the OED, iw is listed as an obsolete form of yew, but uw doesn't seem to have an entry.

> Of wænhyrste on ðone eald iw; ðonone of ðon iwe to Lullan setle.