Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
+1
The sentence is really "O sage, what are we to do?", except the author wanted to accentuate the "O sage" and did so by replacing the coma with an exclamation mark. Capitializing the "W" in "what" makes the "O sage!" a sentence fragment.
Today, we usually consider exclamation marks and question marks as modified versions of full-stops or periods, but I've seen them used as a replacement for a comma in older books.
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I actually think that the "old" way of doing it was a lot better, in that it gave the author the choice of accentuating a word or phrase within a sentence, or ending a sentence. Today, only the second can be done.