Na World Literature Today, escrevi sobre a vírgula: "For linguist and Columbia University professor, John McWhorter, the comma is becoming redundant in the digital age. According to him, we could take commas out most of the texts we read “and would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all”. But it’s not just the internet that agrees with McWhorter; Gertrude Stein considered commas “servile and with no life of their own”, and the Fowler brothers noted in their 1906 book The King's English: “Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his conscience, as severely as we ought to do about disagreeable conduct in real life.” A few years ago, British writer and essayist Pico Iyer came to the rescue of the aforementioned punctuation mark—which, according to scholars, appears in texts at least three times more often than the period, and five times more often than the semicolon. In an interview, Iyer said that contrary to what Professor McWhorter says, we need commas now more than ever: “precisely because punctuation is falling out of our text messages and e-mails, and because we are more in need of a pause than ever before”. According to Iyer, part of the beauty of the comma is that it offers us a break. Without the comma, he muses, “we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication and end up shouting at one another block capitals.” Discussing commas stirs up tempers and, since the time of Saint Jerome—who in the 5th century AD devised the first system of dividing up texts, per cola et commata—sets us before our most intimate pauses and hesitations. Saramago would not be possible without the comma. New Yorker founder Harold Ross put a comma in the line “After dinner, the men went into the living-room” so that the men could have time to push back their chairs, stand up, and then head to the living room. And the sad irony of the opening sentence of Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, and its cold, guarded, emotionally distant protagonist, wouldn’t exist if not for the comma: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” In 2001, Pico Iyer wrote an article for Time magazine in which he claimed discussing commas is like discussing love: “in love the smallest things matter desperately, which is why lovers pay such attention to the tiniest marks on the page,” he says. “And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence.” There is a scene in Spike Jonze's film Her about love and commas. The story takes place sometime in the future, when Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an operating system, Samantha (played by Scarlett Johansson, in a husky, sensual voice). In the scene, the couple argue, and during the fight, Theodore angrily asks his robot girlfriend why she sighed while she was speaking. “Why do you do that? It’s not like you need oxygen or anything.” Apropos the comma, in 1879 Oscar Wilde wrote in his diary: “In the morning I took out a comma, but on mature reflection, I put it back again”."
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