Plain Words (31 page)

Here the comma announces that the relative clause is a commenting one, designed to imply that the mass of young women had this need, with war conditions as the explanation. Without the comma the clause would be read as a defining one, limiting the need to the particular young women who had in fact been deprived of these opportunities (‘those young women who owing to war conditions have been deprived …').

The commas are definitely wrong in:

Any expenditure incurred on major awards to students, who are not recognised for assistance from the Ministry, will rank for grant …

The relative clause must be a defining one, but the commas suggest that it is a commenting one, and imply that no students are recognised for assistance from the Ministry.

In the next quotation too the relative clause is a defining one:

I have made enquiries, and find that the clerk, who dealt with your query, recorded the name of the firm correctly.

The comma turns the relative clause into a commenting one and implies that the writer has only one clerk. The truth is that one of several is being singled out, and this is made clear if the commas after
clerk
and
query
are omitted.

The same mistake is made in:

The Ministry issues permits to employing authorities to enable foreigners to land in this country for the purpose of taking up employment, for which British subjects are not available.

The grammatical implication of this is that employment in general is not a thing for which British subjects are available.

An instruction book called ‘Pre-aircrew English', supplied during the war to airmen in training in Canada, contained an encouragement to its readers to ‘smarten up their English', adding:

Pilots, whose minds are dull, do not usually live long.

The commas convert a truism into an insult.

(4) The insertion of a meaningless comma into an ‘absolute phrase'. An absolute phrase
*
always has parenthetic commas around it, e.g. ‘then, the work being finished, we went home'. But there is no sense in the comma that so often carelessly appears inside it. For instance:

The House of Commons, having passed the third reading by a large majority after an animated debate, the Bill was sent to the Lords.

The first comma leaves the House of Commons in the air waiting for a verb that never comes.

(5) The use of commas in an endeavour to clarify faultily constructed sentences. It is instructive to compare the following extracts from two documents issued by the same department:

It should be noted that the officer who ceased to pay insurance contributions before the date of commencement of his emergency service, remained uninsured for a period, varying between eighteen months and two-and-a-half years, from the date of his last contribution and would, therefore, be compulsorily insured if his emergency service commenced during that period.

Officers appointed to emergency commissions direct from civil life who were not insured for health or pensions purposes at the commencement of emergency service are not compulsorily insured during service.

Why should the first of these extracts be full of commas and the second have none? The answer can only be that, whereas the second sentence is reasonably short and clear, the first is long and obscure. The writer tried to help the reader by putting in five commas, but all this achieved was to give the reader five jolts. The only place where there might properly have been a comma is after
contribution
, and there the writer has omitted to put one.

Another example of the abuse of a comma is:

Moreover, directions and consents at the national level are essential prerequisites in a planned economy, whereas they were only necessary for the establishment of standards for grant-aid and borrowing purposes, in the comparatively free system of yesterday.

The proper place for
in the comparatively free system of yesterday
is after
whereas
, and it is a poor second best to try to throw it back there by putting a comma in front of it.

(6) The
use of a comma to mark the end of the subject of a verb, or the beginning of the object. It cannot be said to be always wrong to use a comma to mark the end of a composite subject, because good writers sometimes do it deliberately. For instance, one might write:

The question whether it is legitimate to use a comma to mark the end of the subject, is an arguable one.

But the comma is unnecessary. The reader does not need its help. To use commas in this way is a dangerous habit; it encourages writers to shirk the trouble of arranging each sentence so as to make its meaning plain without punctuation.

I am however to draw your attention to the fact that goods subject to import licensing which are despatched to this country without the necessary license having first been obtained, are on arrival liable to seizure.

If the subject is so long that it seems to need a boundary post at the end, it would be better not to use the slovenly device of a comma but to rewrite the sentence in conditional form:

if goods subject to import license are despatched … they are on arrival …

And in the following sentence, the comma merely interrupts the flow:

I am now in a position to say that all the numerous delegates who have replied, heartily endorse the recommendation.

Postponement of the object may get the writer into the same trouble:

In the case of both whole-time and part-time officers, the general duties undertaken by them include the duty of treating
without any additional remuneration and without any right to recover private fees, patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act.

This unlovely sentence obviously needs recasting. One way of doing this would be:

The general duties undertaken by both whole-time and part-time officers include the treating of patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act, and they are not entitled to receive additional remuneration for it or to recover private fees.

(7) The use of commas before a clause beginning with
that.
A comma was at one time always used in this position:

It is a just though trite observation, that victorious Rome was herself subdued by the arts of Greece. (Gibbon, 1776)

… the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought, because it cannot be known when it is found. (Dr Johnson, 1781)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, 1813)

We are more sparing of commas nowadays, and this practice has gone out of fashion. In his book of 1939,
Mind the Stop
, Mr G. V. Carey goes so far as to write, ‘it is probably true to say that immediately before the conjunction “that” a comma will be admissible more rarely than before any other con-junction'.

B. Uses of commas that need special care

If
we turn from uses of the comma generally regarded as incorrect to those generally regarded as legitimate, we find one or two that need special care.

(1) The use of commas with adverbs and adverbial phrases.

(
a
)
At the beginning of sentences
.

In their absence, it will be desirable …

Nevertheless, there is need for special care …

In practice, it has been found advisable …

Some writers put a comma here as a matter of course. But others do it only if a comma is needed to emphasise a contrast or to prevent a reader from going off on a wrong scent, as in:

A few days after, the Minister of Labour promised that a dossier of the strike would be published.

Two miles on, the road is worse.

On the principle that stops should not be used unless they are needed, this discrimination is to be commended.

(
b
)
Within sentences
. To enclose an adverb in commas is, as we have seen, a legitimate and useful way of emphasising it. ‘All these things may, eventually, come to pass' is another way of saying ‘All these things may come to pass—eventually'. Or it may serve to emphasise the subject of the sentence: ‘He, perhaps, thought differently'. The commas underline
he
. But certain common adverbs such as
therefore
,
however
,
perhaps
,
of course
, present difficulties because of a convention that they should always be enclosed in commas, whether emphasised or not. This is dangerous. The only safe course is to treat the question as one not of rule but of common sense, and to judge each case on its merits. Lord Dunsany, in his
Donnellan Lectures
, blames printers for this convention:

The writer puts down ‘I am going to Dublin perhaps, with Murphy'. Or he writes ‘I am going to Dublin, perhaps with Murphy'. But in either case these pestilent commas swoop down, not from his pen, but from the darker parts of the cornices where they were bred in the printer's office, and will alight on either side of the word
perhaps
, making it impossible for the reader to know the writer's meaning, making it impossible to see whether the doubt implied by the word
perhaps
affected Dublin or Murphy. I will quote an actual case I saw in a newspaper. A naval officer was giving evidence before a court, and said, ‘I decided on an alteration of course'. But since the words ‘of course' must always be surrounded by commas, the printer's commas came down on them … and the sentence read, ‘I decided upon an alteration, of course'!

The adverb
however
is especially likely to stand in need of clarifying commas. For instance, Burke, in 1791, wrote:

The author is compelled, however reluctantly, to receive the sentence pronounced upon him in the House of Commons as that of the party.

The meaning of this sentence would be different if the comma after ‘reluctantly' were omitted, and one inserted after ‘however':

The author is compelled, however, reluctantly to receive the sentence pronounced upon him …

(2) The ‘throwback' comma. A common use of the comma as a clarifier is to show that what follows it refers not to what immediately precedes it but to something further back. William Cobbett, in the grammar that he wrote for his young son, pointed out that ‘you will be rich if you be industrious, in a few years' did not mean the same as ‘you will be rich, if you be industrious in a few years'. He added:

The first sentence means, that you will,
in a few years' time
, be rich, if you be industrious
now
. The second means, that you will be rich,
some time or other
, if you be industrious
in a few years
from this time
.

In the first sentence the comma that precedes the adverbial phrase ‘in a few years' is a clumsy device. The proper way of writing this sentence is ‘you will be rich in a few years if you be industrious'. If words are arranged in the right order these artificial aids will rarely be necessary.
*

(3) Commas in series.

(
a
)
Nouns and phrases
. Below is a list of nouns:

The company included ambassadors, ministers, bishops and judges.

In a sentence such as this one commas are always put after each item in the series up to the last but one, but practice varies about putting a comma between the last but one, and the
and
introducing the last: ‘ministers, bishops, and judges'. Those who favour a comma there (a minority, but gaining ground) argue that, as a comma may sometimes be necessary to prevent ambiguity, there had better be one there always. Suppose the sentence were this:

The company included the bishops of Winchester, Salisbury, Bristol, and Bath and Wells.

The reader unversed in the English ecclesiastical hierarchy needs the comma after ‘Bristol' in order to sort out the last two bishops. Without it they might be, grammatically and geographically, either (i) Bristol and Bath and (ii) Wells, or (i) Bristol and (ii) Bath and Wells. Ambiguity cannot be justified by saying that
those who are interested will know what is meant and those who are not will not care.

(
b
)
Adjectives
. Where the series is of adjectives preceding a noun, it is a matter of taste whether there are commas between them or not. Both of these are correct:

A silly verbose pompous letter.

A silly, verbose, pompous letter.

The commas merely give a little emphasis to the adjectives. Where the final adjective is one that describes the species of the noun, it is regarded as part of the noun, and is not preceded by a comma. Thus:

A silly, verbose, pompous official letter.

The dash is seductive, tempting writers to use it as a punctuation-maid-of-all-work that saves them the trouble of choosing the right stop. We all know letter-writers who carry this habit to the length of relying on one punctuation mark only—a nondescript symbol that might be a dash or might be something else. Moreover the dash lends itself easily to rhetorical uses that may be out of place in humdrum prose. Perhaps that is why I have been tempted to go to Sir Winston Churchill's war speeches for examples of its recognised uses.

(1) In pairs for parenthesis:

no future generation of English-speaking folks—for that is the tribunal to which we appeal—will doubt that, even at a great cost to ourselves in technical preparation, we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands …