Oh comma, all ye faithful
By Lynne Truss
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a passionate plea for the proper use of punctuation, tops the bestsellers list with more than 70,000 sales and is the surprise hit of the year. In an extract, the author explains the importance of the humble comma - and how it caused a lifelong feud between two literary giants



WHEN THE HUMORIST James Thurber was writing for the New Yorker editor Harold Ross in the 1930s and 1940s, the two men often had very strong words about commas. It is pleasant to picture the scene: two hard-drinking alpha males in serious trilbies smacking a big desk and barking at each other over the niceties of punctuation. According to Thurber’s account of the matter (in The Years with Ross), Ross’s “clarification complex” tended to run somewhat to the extreme: he seemed to believe there was no limit to the amount of clarification you could achieve if you just kept adding commas. Thurber, by self-appointed virtuous contrast, saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability. And so they endlessly disagreed. If Ross were to write “red, white, and blue” with the maximum number of commas, Thurber would defiantly state a preference for “red white and blue ” with none at all, on the provocative grounds that “all those commas make the flag seem rained on. They give it a furled look.”
Thurber once went so far as to send Ross a few typed lines of one of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, repunctuated in New Yorker style:

She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.


But Ross, it seems, was unmoved by sarcasm, and in the end Thurber simply had to resign himself to Ross’s way of thinking. After all, he was the boss; he signed the cheques; and of course he was a brilliant editor, who endearingly admitted once in a letter to H. L. Mencken: “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.” And so the comma proliferated. Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

Why the problem? Why the scope for such differences of opinion? Aren’t there rules for the comma, just as there are rules for the apostrophe? Well, yes; but you will be entertained to discover that there is a significant complication in the case of the comma. More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions: 1. To illuminate the grammar of a sentence 2. To point up — rather in the manner of musical notation — such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow.

This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on — indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time.

If only we hadn’t started reading quietly to ourselves. Things were so simple at the start, before grammar came along and ruined things. The earliest known punctuation — credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200BC — was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. And that ’s all there was to it. A comma, at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word means in Greek “a piece cut off”); and in fact when the word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a discrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love.

For a millennium and a half, punctuation’s purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself. St Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced a system of punctuation of religious texts per cola et commata (“by phrases”), to aid accurate pausing when reading aloud. Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century in southern Italy for the guidance of trainee scribes, included punctuation in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum, recommending “clear pausing in well-regulated delivery”. I do hope Harold Pinter knows about all this, by the way; who would have thought the pause had such a long and significant history? Perhaps the key thing one needs to realise about the early history of punctuation is that, in a literary culture based entirely on the slavish copying of venerated texts, it would be highly presumptuous of a mere scribe to insert helpful marks where he thought they ought to go. Punctuation developed slowly and cautiously not because it wasn’t considered important, but, on the contrary, because it was such intensely powerful ju-ju. Pause in the wrong place and the sense of a religious text can alter in significant ways. For example, as Cecil Hartley pointed out in his 1818 Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing, consider the difference between the following:

“Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” and:

“Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

Huge doctrinal differences hang on the placing of this comma. The first version, which is how Protestants interpret the passage (Luke, xxiii, 43), lightly skips over the whole unpleasant business of Purgatory and takes the crucified thief straight to heaven with Our Lord. The second promises Paradise at some later date (to be confirmed, as it were) and leaves Purgatory nicely in the picture for the Catholics, who believe in it. Similarly, it is argued that the Authorised Version of the Bible (and by extension Handel’s Messiah) misleads on the true interpretation of Isaiah xi, 3. Again, consider the difference:

“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” and:

“The voice of him that crieth: In the wilderness prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

Also: “Comfort ye my people” (please go out and comfort my people) and “Comfort ye, my people” (just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen).

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.

Page 2: Beckett can, but you can't

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 learnt 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 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.

1. Commas for lists
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 ands in the vicinity:

I went to the chemist, Marks & Spencer, and NatWest.

I went to NatWest, 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.

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.

2. Commas for joining
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.

3. Commas filling gaps
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.

4. Commas before direct speech
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?”

5. Commas setting off interjections
Blimey, what would we do without it? Stop, or I’ll scream.

6. Commas that come in pairs
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.

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 see only one of them. Thus:

Of course, there weren’t enough tickets to go round. is, from the grammatical point of view, the same as:

There weren’t, of course, enough tickets to go round. as well as:

There weren’t enough tickets to go round, of course.

In many cases nowadays, the commas bracketing so-called weak interruptions are becoming optional. And I say three cheers for that, quite frankly. Where I get into a tangle with copy-editors is with sentences such as:

Belinda opened the trap door, and after listening for a minute she closed it again.

This is, actually, all right. True, it isn’t elegant, but it uses the comma grammatically as a “joining” comma, before the “and”. Most editors, however, turn purple at the sight of such a sentence. It becomes, suddenly:

Belinda opened the trap door and, after listening for a minute, closed it again.

It seems to me that there are two proper uses of the comma in conflict here, and that the problem arises simply from the laudable instinct in both the writer and the editor to choose just one use at a time. In previous centuries — as is obvious from the works of Fielding and Dickens — every single use of the comma would be observed: Belinda opened the trap door, and, after listening for a minute, she closed it again.

Nowadays the fashion is against grammatical fussiness. A passage peppered with commas — which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention — smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books. Back at the New Yorker, Thurber tells the story of “the grison anecdote” — a story about a soap salesman who belatedly spots a grison (a South American weasel-like carnivore) on a porch in New Jersey. Now, Thurber says he commanded Ross not to change a word of this piece, but he was obviously asking for trouble. “It preserves the fine texture of the most delicate skin and lends a lasting and radiant rosiness to the complexion my God what is that thing?” says the salesman. Ross, of course, inserted a comma after “my God”. He just couldn’t help himself.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, Profile Books, £9.99. Available from Times Books First at £8.49 + 99p p&p. Call 0870-160 8080

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Copyright Lynne Truss and Times Newspapers, 2003