Making a Point (24 page)

26

Commas, the serial killer

In 2013 in the UK, the new Spelling Punctuation and Grammar test, introduced for children at the upper end of primary schools (around the age of ten) came in for a huge amount of criticism because of the linguistic inadequacy of the questions it set. This was Question 15 in paper 1:

‘Which of the sentences below uses commas correctly?' Tick one.

We'll, need a board, counters, and a pair of dice.

We'll need a board, counters and a pair, of dice.

We'll need a board, counters, and, a pair of dice.

We'll need a board, counters and a pair of dice.

What's immediately obvious to any punctuation-aware person is that the main alternative to the last example is missing:

We'll need a board, counters, and a pair of dice.

Was this just by chance? No. Further down the same test, we see Question 27:

Insert three commas in the correct places in the sentence below.

I need to pack a swimming costume some sun cream a hat sunglasses and a towel.

Only three? The examiners are clearly looking for this answer:

I need to pack a swimming costume, some sun cream, a hat, sunglasses and a towel.

Their intention is made clear in the guidance notes. Markers are told: ‘Do not accept the serial comma' – a comma before
and
.

In my blog at the time, I railed against the surfacing in exams of the ‘ugly face of prescriptivism' – by which I mean the imposition of unauthentic rules on a language. Somebody at top level in government clearly doesn't like the serial comma and feels they have the right to impose this personal taste on everyone else. I would have failed that question, as I use the serial comma in my writing. So does Oxford University Press. All failures.

That's where the serial comma got its other name: the ‘Oxford comma'. We see it in the set of rules devised by Horace Hart for the Press in 1893. This is the relevant section:

Where
and
joins two single words or phrases the comma is usually omitted; e.g.

The honourable and learned member.

But where more than two words or phrases occur together in a sequence a comma should precede the final
and
; e.g.

A great, wise, and beneficient measure.

There we are. The principle would apply equally if the conjunction were
or
. And generations of writers have followed this lead – though not, evidently, the teachers who taught the minister of education in 2013.

Why did Hart go for the comma? Because Lindley Murray did – along with all the other influential grammarians and printers who wrote on the subject in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. This was the era of heavy punctuation, and it carries over into the twentieth century. The leading American usage guide, William Strunk and E B White's
The Elements of Style
(1919), used the serial comma. It was so routine that, when Henry Fowler used it in his examples of lists, in his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926), he didn't even bother to comment on it.

So why was it used? David Steel explains it this way in his
Elements of Punctuation
(1786):

Three or more adjectives, belonging to the same substantive, with or without copulatives, should be separated by commas.

He illustrates from the sentence:

Ulysses was a wise, eloquent, cautious, and intrepid hero.

And he gives this explanation:

intrepid
is not more particularly connected with
hero
than
wise
or
eloquent
– all equally belong to the substantive, and ought to have the same degree of separation or connection.

This was the view maintained throughout the nineteenth century, by printers as well as grammarians. John Wilson addresses the issue in his 1844
Treatise
. In his chapter on the comma, he mentions that some punctuators omit the serial comma, but he recommends it, and explains in a note:

The propriety of using the comma will perhaps be obvious to any one who attentively examines the construction of such sentences, and who perceives that the last two words of a series are not more closely connected in sense with each other than with those which precede.

So there's a solid semantic reason why the comma should
be there. It reinforces the parallelism between all the items in a list. If we omit it, that sense of connectivity is reduced – though in examples like the
Ulysses
sentence not by much. That's why people readily omit it: they argue that it makes no difference to the meaning, and that the
and
does the connecting job of the comma anyway, as shown by such alternatives as
an old, comfortable chair
and
an old and comfortable chair
. Eric Partridge, for example, in
You Have a Point There
(1953) says commas in this position ‘are excessive, for they perform no useful work'. As a result, because they can't see any semantic reason for it, they begin to use it inconsistently, allowing such random factors as the length of the words in the list or their sense of timing to influence whether they add one or not.

This is one of the reasons John McWhorter made his prophesy (quoted in the previous chapter) about the demise of the comma. He highlighted the inconsistency in the use of the serial comma, observing:

Nobody has any reason for it that is scientifically sensible and logical in the sense that we know how hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.

This is a bit unfair on the early grammarians, who were at pains to find logical reasons for its use, but it does represent the way attitudes towards the comma changed during the twentieth century. ‘We are more sparing of commas nowadays', writes Ernest Gowers in his influential
Plain Words
(1948). And the remark is even more true today, turning up without revision in his granddaughter's new edition of his book (Rebecca Gowers, 2014).

Where did the idea to drop the comma come from? Most publishers retained it, on both sides of the Atlantic, following the guidance of Fowler, Strunk and White, and other manuals
such as
The Chicago Manual of Style
(first edition in 1906). Its omission grew gradually during the early twentieth century, as part of the trend towards punctuation minimalism. Newspapers and magazines on the whole avoided it, to save space and (in the days when typesetting was painstakingly by hand) time and energy. Critics argued that an unnecessary comma was an intrusion that delayed the reader. And developing a clean look to the page was one of the ways in which a forward-looking publishing house could distinguish itself from the conservative practices of other presses. Smaller houses instructed their copy-editors to delete it from type-scripts, unless it caused an ambiguity, and we see the practice spreading around English-speaking nations such as Australia and Canada. Cambridge University Press, anxious to distinguish itself from Oxford, routinely abandoned it. In my very first book for Cambridge,
Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English
(1969), we find such strings as ‘grammar, vocabulary and segmental phonology'. That isn't what I wrote, but it didn't bother me.

As the century progressed, some publishers began to take a more equable view, acknowledging the fact that diversity was the norm. Judith Butcher, in her influential handbook for Cambridge University Press,
Copy-Editing
(§6.12), allows both practices:

In lists of three or more items, a comma should be consistently omitted or included before the final ‘and': red, white and blue; red, white, and blue.

And you will thus find the serial comma throughout all my later writing for that Press including the series of Cambridge general encyclopedias. But everything still depends on the publisher. The house style used by Profile Books omits them. In the introduction to my
Spell It Out
(2012), we read:

we encounter a host of anomalies, variations and exceptions.

In my manuscript, it appears as:

we encounter a host of anomalies, variations, and exceptions.

In the margin of the online copy-edited typescript, in bold blue under ‘track changes', I see the message:

Jane 23/2/12 16:38

Deleted
:,

The death of my comma, precisely timed. (I was allowed to keep my serial comma in the present book, given its subject-matter!)

Every writer on punctuation in the twentieth century recognized the diversity of practice. Here's G V Carey in
Mind the Stop
(1939,
Chapter 3
) arguing that usage here is ‘a matter of individual choice'. He belongs to what he calls the ‘final comma school', as do I, and he gives a reason:

because the ‘no final comma' principle breaks down now and again through ambiguity, whilst the ‘final comma' principle can be followed consistently with less risk of it, I personally vote for the latter.

Ernest Gowers belongs to the ‘no final comma school'. After giving an example, he says:

commas are always put after each item in the series up to the last but one

though he immediately acknowledges that ‘practice varies'. Interestingly, he gets the reason wrong:

Those who favour a comma there (a minority, but gaining ground) …

In fact, it was the other way round. Everyone from Murray to Fowler had used the serial comma. It was the omitters who were gaining ground.

Whatever the school you belonged to, everyone agreed that there were exceptions, and that avoidance of ambiguity must be the primary rule. If it's ambiguous to omit the comma, don't omit it. If it's ambiguous to insert the comma, don't insert it. We see both cases here:

• Adding the comma helps:
  

  In the first part of the evening, the choir will sing two hymns, Old Man River and Shenandoah.
  

  How many items are being sung? Two or four? If you're not sure whether the named pieces count as hymns, you have no idea. Adding a comma before the
  and
  would show that they don't.
  

• Omitting the comma helps:
  

  I'm inviting my brother, a playwright, and three actors to the party.
  

  How many people are coming to the party? If
  playwright
  is in apposition to
  brother
  (that is, the brother
  is
  the playwright), there are five. If it's a list, there are four. Omitting the comma before the
  and
  would push the sense towards the ‘five' interpretation.
  

Any textbook on punctuation will draw your attention to examples like these. Their value is that they show total consistency to be impossible, when it comes to the serial comma, because of the complexity of English syntax. And
we can generalize this point to the use of the comma in other syntactic domains. Even quite basic rules might have exceptions. Take the one I described in the previous chapter: no comma between subject and verb or between verb and object. That's a fairly strict rule today, but there are still exceptions. If a clause uses two instances of the same word, we see writers using a comma to help remove a source of possible confusion:

Whatever his name is, is of no concern to me.

And when commas are used in direct speech, there may be a comma between the verb and an object:

She said, ‘I'm in the front room.'

The only rule that never has any exceptions is the one forbidding a comma within the elements of a phrase that has no serial content. We never find:

the, car

her beautiful, dress

I will, go

in, the garden

The only possible way to interrupt a phrase is if we include another unit within it, and then we need a different convention involving pairs of marks:

This is her beautiful (I do hope you agree) dress.

There are also some strictly controlled specialized settings where individual conventions apply, such as in bibliographies and indexes, where the comma separates surnames and first names (
Crystal, D
.). In mathematics it separates thousands, as in
14,236
(and in some places, decimals, see p. 136). Even
here, though, we may see variation, such as the replacement of the comma by a space.

Exceptions and ambiguities exist, but we mustn't exaggerate their importance as a guide to general practice. With the serial comma, for every one case of possible ambiguity, there are ninety-nine where there's no ambiguity at all, and we are faced with a straight pragmatic choice. As Ernest Gowers says:

The correct use of the comma – if there is such a thing as ‘correct' use – can only be acquired by common sense, observation, and taste.

And, I would add, a linguistic perspective.