From the Garret: Archives

Commas Matter!

Recently, I received one of those multi-forwarded emails my well-meaning friends like to clutter up my inbox with entitled “Four all who reed and right.” It had a three-page list of the weird inconsistencies of our native tongue, such as:

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert;
There's no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger;
We have noses that run and feet that smell.

The email concludes, “Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.”

Possibly, but we're stuck with our quirky idiosyncratic idiom--as are billions of other people who speak it as either a second or third language--so we need to make the best of it.

One of the tools which help us bring sense to our sometimes nonsensical lingo is the punctuation mark. Lynne Truss' recent (and hilarious) bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves has at last brought the importance of punctuation to the forefront of the public consciousness, and about time too! Although she goes over-the-top on the subject of forming “an army of well-informed punctuation vigilantes” armed with red pens and apostrophes on the ends of poles, her deeper message is an important one. All language is about clear communication; proper punctuation contributes to clarity.

Writers have always been aware of the significance of the semi-colon and exclamation point. Oscar Wilde famously spent all of one morning inserting a single comma and all of the afternoon taking it out... or vice versa.

Russell Baker explains, “When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly—with body language. Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brows. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.” Think of the proliferation of those little emoticons (otherwise known as “smiley faces”) in emails. Note that they are constructed of punctuation marks.

However, the neglect of proper punctuation can have a powerful impact on the real world as well. In vivid illustration, Ms. Truss quotes a famously ambiguous telegram which provoked the disastrous Jameson Raid in the Transvaal in 1896. The colonists wrote:

It is under these circumstances that we feel constrained to call upon you to come to our aid should a disturbance arise here the circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue of people who are so situated.

An unknown journalist at The Times inserted a period after the word “aid,” causing the raid to be set in motion immediately. Alas, the period should have come after the word “here,” and the colonists were unprepared and unwilling to support a battle they hadn't called for. Blood was shed for the lack of a period.

Using punctuation properly is like driving a car. You have to know whether an apostrophe goes to the left or the right of an “s” for the same reason you have to know that in the United States, you drive on the right side of the road and in England, you drive on the left. The rules are there to keep everyone moving in the same direction without colliding head-on through a misunderstanding.

Sticklers for proper punctuation are not a bunch of strange, anti-social obssessives. They are people who want readers to recognize their body language. They are people who want to avoid unnecessary raids and head-on collisions. They are people who want to be understood clearly.

Join the crusade and raise the battle cry: Commas matter!