If it is not now clear that the punctuation of Nos. 67 and 67-1 violates the fundamental principles of the meanings of both marks and sense relations, it may be worth while to consider the subject further.
Mr. Teall does not go quite so far as Mr. Garrison, who puts the three marks into a class from which any one may be selected for the punctuation of Sentence 67. Mr. Teall, however, makes the following statement (page 50): “As in some instances there is no absolute choice between commas and parentheses, so also there is none between parentheses and dashes.” He illustrates the latter part of his statement, but not the former. His illustrative example is a sentence taken from Mr. Wilson’s work, which sentence, he says, may take either the parentheses or the dashes. We give the sentence (No. 68) as punctuated by Mr. Wilson:
68. If we exercise right principles (and we can not have them unless we exercise them), they must be perpetually on the increase.
Mr. Teall evidently agrees with Mr. Wilson in the punctuation of the sentence, which, he says, may as well take dashes; but he expresses no choice between the two modes of punctuation.
We have already said that this punctuation violates fundamental principles; and that it does so is evidenced by Mr. Wilson’s definitions. In one place (page 168) he defines a parenthesis as “words thrown obliquely into the body of a sentence”; and on the preceding page he says a parenthesis is “an expression inserted in the body of a sentence,[8] with which it has no connection in sense or in construction.” Mr. Teall gives a like definition of a parenthesis.
The meaning of “obliquely thrown into” is, we think, unmistakable. It is equivalent to “thrust into,” and characterizes matter that is “without grammatical connection.”
It does not seem to us true that the parenthesis (group of words) in No. 68 has “no connection in sense” with the sentence. As “and” gives it constructive connection, why does “and” not give it sense relation? and why is “and” used, what does it mean, and what does it connect?
The punctuation of No. 67-2 seems to us to be in accord with the fundamental meanings that determine the use of marks; and it at once differentiates the dash from the two other marks. These principles are violated in the punctuation of No. 68, which requires dashes.
COMMAS AND PARENTHESES
The differentiation of the comma, or commas, from parentheses, is the differentiation of the purely parenthetical from the slightly parenthetical. The purely parenthetical word or expression is wholly detached from the essential meaning of the language in which it is found, and properly takes marks of parenthesis as evidence of this fact; the slightly parenthetical is in grammatical relation with some word or words in the language in which it appears.