I tell my students it is no accident that the mark is half-comma and half-period.
Both the comedy and tragedy masks use the same basic shape for the eyes - a rounded comma or half-crescent shape with one thick end and one tapering end.
Many of its keys (including, alas, the period and the comma) are mere slivers, half the width of normal keys.
In her scrappy treatise on punctuation and its discontents, Lynne Truss mentions that a certain kind of comma should be treated as half of a pair, "even if you can only see one of them".
Eliminating commas, however, does not account for cutting it down to less than half.
About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes.
Over in a converted fire station, PC Music emissary Danny L Harle has half the audience dancing with genuine abandon to his brilliantly overstuffed J-pop and happy hardcore; the other half dancing with inverted commas, trapped behind the hipster's irony shield.
