Russian Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna reportedly once saved the life of a man by transposing a single comma in a warrant signed by her husband, Alexander III (1845-1894), exiling a man to death in Siberia.
On the bottom of the warrant, the Tsar had written: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.”
The Tsarina changed the punctuation so that the instructions read instead as follows: “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.” The man was set free.
Punctuation is usually not a matter of life and death — but it certainly does affect the meaning of a sentence, which is the intended lesson of this anecdote.
Note: Though the use of the comma in the Tsar’s original warrant is not correct according to the standards of contemporary American English (which would call for a dash or a colon), it was correct according to the conventions of the Russian language, which, like many others, allows for looser usage of punctuation than English.
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