Gramer Girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about a famous line from Gone with the Wind and about whether we're

returning to normalcy or normality and whether there's a difference.

The phrase, frankly, my dear, begins one of the most memorable movie lines of our time.

Ret Butler, played by Clark Gable, said those three words to start his final parting line

to Scarlett O'Hara, played by Vivian Lee in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind.

Even if you've never seen that movie, you've likely heard that movie line.

It created quite a stir because it ended with a profanity that was frowned upon on screen

at the time.

And though the movie producer was granted an exception by the Hayes office to use it.

Eventually, that controversy died down, but another controversy arose concerning

that line that has nothing to do with profanity and everything to do with punctuation.

In the book Gone with the Wind, the word frankly is absent from that iconic line spoken

by Ret to Scarlett.

The line just begins with, my dear, followed by a comma.

The producer David Selznick added, frankly, followed by a comma, and he was insistent

about the comma, as can be seen in his list of possible, less offensive ways to end the

line.

Each suggestion that he considered began with, frankly, my dear, with a comma after frankly

and after dear.

...