To return to the OP, and to summarise, privacy in correspondence is a function of the ethics of the participants.
RobJohnson (August 9th, 2020)
Yes I would agree with that, truth and honesty. I have thought that the point of a PM was because you wanted to say or ask something confidence that you did not want to seen by all, but if the recipient shares that information with others then ethics and integrity are minimal.
Trust no one and one day you may be surprised.
I am intrigued by your envelope Chemyst, being interested in postal ephemera, this is a letter mailed in 1941 in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, a town I know very well, sent to North America by airmail and opened by a security service and resealed. Would you think that this private letter was opened by security in the US or prior to leaving England and do you know why there is no address and yet the envelope has been franked?
I take your point - there is no such thing as a truly Private Messages even by snail mail.
Last edited by Johnny_S; August 9th, 2020 at 12:39 PM.
I don't know who you are referring to as "you", but if it's me, I certainly wasn't offended. Because he (TS, I mean) was right.
In any case, there is something else to consider besides clarity, and that is how something reads. The example that TS gave, like most sentences without the comma, is somewhat jarring. Perhaps it's my mild autism, but I'm probably not the only one who is stopped in my tracks and irritated when I see such a sentence. Is the writer completely unconcerned about such an effect? Perhaps they're not sensitive to it. In any case, I don't like it, and subsequently choose to not do it myself.
I would agree with this. Last year our island's governor had to resign because his "private" messages sent on an encrypted telephone app (Telegram) were divulged by one of the participants. The only difference was that the governor's messages were completely unethical, vulgar, mysoginistic, homophobic, and all around creepy awful. So I believe the ethical thing to do in that case was to make the "private" message public.
This is a good question. There was a time, many decades ago when school age children were taught to write as they would speak. Punctuation, we were taught, was not only grammatical, but expressive. Commas for instance, were used to separate clauses, but also to 'meter' for expression by indicating a pause for emphasis. I don't know if this is what is being taught now, or if it has been in the last 50 years or so.
Our language and how it is used has changed -- and it will continue to evolve.
At a guess, it was most likely opened before it left England. The US was not in the war until December 1941 and had no need for wartime censorship security.
Coincidentally, My grandfather, a Sergeant in a Highland regiment served as a censor after he was severely wounded on the Somme in 1916. My sister and I have original copies of photos with 'Passed for publication' stamped over his signature.
No, this is not a comma usage rule. Expressive pauses in speaking may come where a comma or other punctuation mark is, but one should not put a comma in to indicate a rhetorical pause. Punctuation use is based on logical syntactical relationships (nearly entirely) and not on emphasis in vocalization (except, of course, the exclamation point or question mark).
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Jon Szanto (August 9th, 2020)
"When Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick;
and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."
~ Benjamin Franklin
An old bloke (August 9th, 2020), TSherbs (August 9th, 2020)
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