Yet More Comma Drama
From The New York Times commentator Frank Bruni's newsletter (via email)
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Punctuation is personal. |
Punctuation inspires passion. |
And I suffer from alliteration excess. |
Those are the lessons from your responses to my denigration of the Oxford comma in last week’s newsletter and from my last three sentences. |
Dozens of you wrote in either to affirm my anti-Oxford-comma position or to disagree strongly with it. The disagreements outnumbered the affirmations, and they’re what I’ll showcase here. |
They boiled down to one word: clarity. Many of you rightly pointed out that abandonment of the Oxford or serial comma, which comes before the “and” and the last part of a list of three or more things, can yield confusion. As Gary Singer of East Lansing, Mich., wrote: |
There is a significant difference between these two statements, and that itty bitty comma creates that separation. “He loves his parents, Tony Bennett, and Lady Gaga.” “He loves his parents, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.” |
Gary’s point, obviously, is that the first sentence makes clear that “he” loves two people in addition to his parents, while the second sentence could mean that he merely loves two: his parents, who are Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. (That’s some D.N.A.) |
The “parents” example was a favorite of yours, deployed rather mischievously. Dwight Penas of Minneapolis presented this potentially misleading (in his view) sentence: “The author wishes to thank his parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Anita MacDonald of Sarasota, Fla., presented this one: “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.” |
Not sure why Lady Gaga is the fecund mother of multiple Oxford-comma defenses. But there you have it. |
Kath Jesme of St. Paul, Minn., moved beyond the realm of propagation to argue that if a writer has eschewed the Oxford comma across the board, then a Frost-ian description of the woods as “lovely, dark and deep” could mean either that they were lovely by dint of being dark and deep or that they were lovely and dark and deep, all separate qualities in the author’s mind and intent. |
Several of you recalled that actual litigation had arisen because of ambiguity created by an Oxford comma’s absence. |
David Cadigan of Sullivan, Maine, noted that dairy farmers in his state won a multimillion-dollar judgment several years ago because a state overtime law exempted workers involved in the “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” various goods. A judge ruled that “distribution” was not obviously and unequivocally its own activity, as “packing for shipment or distribution” might conceivably be all that was exempted. (Dave Moore of Fripp Island, S.C., also directed me to that case — and to this grammar-centric analysis of it.) |
Straying from a strict discussion of the Oxford comma, Sarah Crim of Bowie, Md., shared the words on a T-shirt of hers: |
LET’S EAT KIDS. LET’S EAT, KIDS. PUNCTUATION SAVES LIVES |
“I realize that there should be a period after the word ‘lives,’ but it’s a good T-shirt, anyway,” she wrote. Agreed. |
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