Eats, Shoots & Leaves (7 page)

No wonder feelings run high about the comma. When it comes to improving the clarity of a sentence, you can nearly always argue that one should go in; you can nearly always argue that one should come out. Stylists have meanwhile always dickered with the rules: Oscar Wilde famously spent all day on a completed poem, dangling a questionable comma over it; Gertrude Stein called the comma
“servile” and refused to have anything to do with it; Peter Carey cleverly won the Booker Prize in 2001 for a book that contained no commas at all (
True History of the Kelly Gang
); and I have seen an essay on the internet seriously accusing John Updike, that wicked man, of bending the rules of the comma to his own ends “with fragments, comma splices, coordinate clauses without commas, ellipted coordinate clauses with commas,
and more
” – charges to which, of course, those of us with no idea what an ellipted-coordinate-clause-with-a-comma might look like can only comment, “Tsk”.

Meanwhile, lawyers eschew the comma as far as possible, regarding it as a troublemaker; and readers grow so accustomed to the dwindling incidence of commas in public places that when signs go up saying “No dogs please”, only one person in a thousand bothers to point out that actually, as a statement, “no dogs please” is an indefensible generalisation, since many dogs
do
please, as a matter of fact; they rather make a point of it.

“The use of commas cannot be learned by rule.” Such was the opinion of the great Sir Ernest Gowers; and I have to say I find that a comfort, coming from the grand old boy himself. However, rules certainly exist for the comma and we may as well examine some of them. The fun of commas is of course the semantic havoc they can create when either wrongly inserted (“What is this thing called, love?”) or carelessly omitted (“He shot himself as a child”).
*
A friend of mine who runs a Shakespeare reading group in New England tells a delightful story of a chap playing Duncan in
Macbeth
who listened with appropriate pity and concern while the wounded soldier in Act I gave his account of the battle, and then cheerfully called out, “Go get him, surgeons!” (It’s supposed to be “Go, get him surgeons.”)

But we’ll come to such lovely enjoyable things by and by. In the meantime, however, this is serious. Sharpen a pencil, line up your favourite stimulants, furrow the brow, and attempt to concentrate on the following.

This is probably the first thing you ever learn about commas, that they divide items in lists, but are not required before the
and
on the end:

The four refreshing fruit flavours of Opal Fruits are orange, lemon, strawberry and lime.

I had a marvellous time eating in tavernas, swimming in the turquoise water, getting sloshed on retsina and not sending postcards.

The colours of the Union Jack are red, white and blue.

The rule here is that the comma is correct if it can be replaced by the word
and
or
or
. For example: “I had a marvellous time eating in tavernas
and
swimming in the turquoise water
and
getting sloshed on retsina and not sending postcards.” This would be the grammatical consequence of omitting the comma: a sentence that is clumsy (and sounds a lot more sloshed), but still counts as grammatical. What a loss to the language it was, incidentally, when they changed the name of Opal Fruits to Starburst.

However, if you feel you are safe paddling in these sparklingly clear shallows of comma usage, think again. See that comma-shaped shark fin ominously slicing through the waves in this direction? Hear that staccato cello? Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma) and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this:
never
get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don’t know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: “The flag is red, white, and blue.”

So what do you think of it? (It’s the comma after “white”.) Are you for it or against it? Do you hover in between? In Britain, where standard usage is to leave it out, there are those who put it in – including, interestingly,
Fowler’s Modern English Usage
. In America, conversely, where standard usage is to leave it in, there are those who make a point of removing it (especially journalists). British grammarians will concede that sometimes the extra
comma prevents confusion, as when there are other
and
s in the vicinity:

I went to the chemist, Marks & Spencer, and Nat West.

I went to Nat West, the chemist, and Marks & Spencer.

But this isn’t much of a concession, when you think about it. My own feeling is that one shouldn’t be too rigid about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn’t. For example, in the introduction to this book (page
ref
) I allude to punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language: “they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop”. And, well, I argued for that Oxford comma. It seemed to me that without the comma after “detour”, this was a list of three instructions (the last a double one), not four. And here was a case where the stylistic reasons for its inclusion clearly outweighed the grammatical ones for taking it out. This was a decelerating sentence. The commas were incrementally applying the brakes. To omit the comma after “detour” would
have the sentence suddenly coasting at speed again instead of slowing to the final halt.

Anyway, there are some more points about commas in lists before we move on. In a list of adjectives, again the rule is that you use a comma where an
and
would be appropriate – where the modifying words are all modifying the same thing to the same degree:

It was a dark, stormy night.

(The night was dark and stormy)

He was a tall, bearded man.

(The man was tall and bearded)

But you do NOT use a comma for:

It was an endangered white rhino.

Australian red wines are better than

Australian white ones.

The grand old Duke of York had ten thousand men.

This is because, in each of these cases, the adjectives do their jobs in joyful combination; they are not
intended as a list. The rhino isn’t endangered
and
white. The wines aren’t Australian
and
red. The Duke of York wasn’t grand
and
old. The wedding wasn’t big
and
fat
and
Greek.

Commas are used when two complete sentences are joined together, using such conjunctions as
and
,
or
,
but
,
while
and
yet
:

The boys wanted to stay up until midnight, but they grew tired and fell asleep.

I thought I had the biggest bag of Opal Fruits, yet Cathy proved me wrong.

If this seems a bit obvious to you, I apologise. But trouble arises with this joining-comma rule from two directions: when stylists deliberately omit the conjunction and just keep the comma where a semicolon is called for (this is the “splice comma” John Updike is accused of), and when the wrong joining words are used. The splice comma first.

It was the Queen’s birthday on Saturday, she got a lot of presents.

Jim woke up in an unfamiliar bed, he felt lousy.

Now, so many highly respected writers adopt the splice comma that a rather unfair rule emerges on this one: only do it if you’re famous. Samuel Beckett spliced his way merrily through such novels as
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way: “There I am then, he leaves me, he’s in a hurry.” But then Beckett was not only a genius, he was a man who wrote in French when he didn’t have to; we can surely agree he earned the right to be ungrammatical if he felt like it. Besides, he is not alone. E. M. Forster did it; Somerset Maugham did it; the list is endless. Done knowingly by an established writer, the comma splice is effective, poetic, dashing. Done equally knowingly by people who are not published writers, it can look weak or presumptuous. Done ignorantly by ignorant people, it is awful.

Meanwhile, words that must not be used to join two sentences together with a comma are
however
and
nevertheless
, as in, “It was the Queen’s birthday
on Saturday, nevertheless, she had no post whatever”; “Jim woke up in his own bed, however, he felt great.” Again, the requirement is for either a new sentence or one of those unpopular semicolons.

It was the Queen’s birthday on Saturday; nevertheless, she had no post whatever.

Jim woke up in his own bed; however, he felt great.

Are we halfway yet? I hope so, but I doubt it. Anyway, this one is quite simple, involving missing words cunningly implied by a comma:

Annie had dark hair; Sally, fair.

This doesn’t arise very much these days, though, does it? I wonder why?

This usage is likely to lapse. Many writers prefer to
use colons; others just open the inverted commas – a pretty unambiguous sign that direct speech is coming. Personally, I seem to ring the changes. Since this is a genuine old pause-for-breath use of the comma, however, it would be a shame to see it go.

The Queen said, “Doesn’t anyone know it’s my birthday?”

Blimey, what would we do without it? Stop, or I’ll scream.

This is where comma usage all starts getting tricky. The first rule of bracketing commas is that you use them to mark both ends of a “weak interruption” to a sentence – or a piece of “additional information”. The commas mark the places where the reader can – as it were – place an elegant two-pronged fork and cleanly lift out a section of the sentence, leaving no obvious damage to the whole. Thus:

John Keats, who never did any harm to anyone, is often invoked by grammarians.

I am, of course, going steadily nuts.

Nicholas Nickleby
, published in 1839, uses a great many commas.

The Queen, who has double the number of birthdays of most people, celebrated yet another birthday.

In all these cases, the bits between the commas can be removed, leaving the sentence arguably less interesting, but grammatically entire.

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved, incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it’s like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It’s just not cricket. Take the example, “The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.” Sensitive people trained to listen
for the second comma (after “best”) find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over.

However, why is it that sometimes these pairs of commas are incorrect? One
Telegraph
correspondent wrote to complain about a frequent newspaper solecism, and the example he gave was, “The leading stage director, Nicholas Hytner, has been appointed to the Royal National Theatre.” Shouldn’t the commas be removed in cases such as this, he asked? Well, yes. Absolutely. For a start, if you removed the name “Nicholas Hytner” from this particular sentence, it would make no sense at all. But there is a larger grammatical point here, too. Consider the difference between:

The people in the queue who managed to get tickets were very satisfied.

and:

The people in the queue, who managed to get tickets, were very satisfied.

In the first case, the reader infers from the absence of commas that not everyone in the queue was fortunate. Some people did not get tickets. (The ones who did were, naturally, cock-a-hoop.) In the second version everyone in the queue gets tickets, hurrah, and I just hope it turned out to be for something nice. The issue here is whether the bit between the commas is “defining” or not. If the clause is “defining”, you don’t need to present it with a pair of commas. Thus:

The Highland Terriers that live in our street aren’t cute at all.

If the information in the clause is “non-defining”, however, then you do:

The Highland Terriers, when they are barking, are a nightmare.

Now, here’s a funny thing. When the interruption to the sentence comes at the beginning or at the end, the grammatical rule of commas-in-pairs still applies,
even if you can only see one of them
. Thus: