Commas can change meaning (“eats shoots and leaves” versus “eats, shoots and leaves” or “I ate, grandma” versus “I ate grandma”), but over a century ago, commas helped change the Russian government.
In 1905, uprisings broke out all across the Russian Empire as peasants, workers, and soldiers revolted against the repression and violence they lived under. This would eventually lead to the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.
Among the agitators were the workers at Sytin’s Moscow publishing house. At the time, printers were paid by the letter set, but this didn’t include punctuation. From “A history of punctuation” by Florence Hazrat in Aeon:
…in 1905, Moscow printers demanded to be paid for setting not only letters but also punctuation marks, which required the same action and the same amount of time as the alphabet. What is known as the “Comma Strike” spread popular boycott throughout the country, leading to the czar ceding Russia its first constitution.
And from a 1950s academic article title “The Strike and The Revolution” by Feliks Gross in Il Politico:
The October uprising of the 1905 revolution was triggered by an economic strike. The printers in a Moscow shop struck, because they were not paid for commas, semi-colons and periods – in a word, for punctuation. A railroad strike followed. The railroad strike spread and changed into a general and political protest.
The commas that started a revolution. A good, post-Labor Day reminder that all labor, including placing punctuation is consequential.
