saffronsugar replied to your post “I have three words from this Victorian housekeeping guide that I...”
the commas........ why were they like this..............
throughout the history of mass publication, punctuation (especially, very notably, commas and APOSTROPHES) has actually been very unstable--which makes sense because there aren’t always audible cues to tell you how these things ‘ought to’ be used. the short answer is that in the 19th century (according, not only to what we can tell from usage, but to what’s explicitly laid out in several contemporary guides on writing and grammar) commas were used to separate breath groups rather than grammatical phrases. in other words, the criteria deciding where commas would appear were often prosodic (relating to prosody--how language is actually spoken in terms of pitch, rhythm, breath, stress, &c.) rather than syntactic (relating to how words are grammatically combined into sentences).
