Word Nerd: C is for comma

By Rebecca Christian

The lowly comma may be the workhorse of the punctuation world, but oh, what a difference that squiggle can make. Lynne Truss proved this point delightfully in her wildly if unexpectedly popular book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

The title comes from an old joke: A panda walks into a bar, orders a sandwich, shoots the waiter, and starts to leave. When the bar owner demands an explanation, he shrugs, “I’m a panda. Look it up.” And of course in the dictionary, the panda is defined as a tree-dweller that eats shoots and leaves.

At Traditional Home, predictably enough, we take a traditional approach to punctuation. Hence we use “the series comma,” meaning that if three or more things are listed in a sentence, we use commas after each. Here’s an example from our upcoming May issue:

“The rods, brackets, finials, and rings are all custom, as are the rugs.”

There’s a fancier way to explain the series comma, also called the Harvard comma if you want to go all Ivy League about it. The Chicago Manual of Style decrees: “In a series consisting of three or more elements, the elements are separated by commas. When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series, a comma is used before the conjunction.”

I can see your eyes glazing over at the mention of a conjunction, the way mine would if someone tried to make me eat lentils or introduce me to an algorithm (bad enough it’s mathy; it always looks spelled funny, too).  Here is a classic example of why the series comma can be useful: One of the phenomenal winners of our Classic Woman Awards for volunteeerism might write in gratitude for the recognition,

“I would like to thank my parents, God and Eleanor Roosevelt.”

It makes it sound as though the honoree’s parents are God and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Sometimes I get reckless and put a comma in not because of the rules my fearsome eighth-grade grammar teacher taught me—she of the dragon breath and sturdy brogans—but because if I were reading the sentence aloud, that is the place where I would need to take a breath. A comma is the pause that refreshes, like  Coca-Cola.

If you really want to clear the room you can discourse upon the subject of whether a dependent clause should or should not be set off by a comma. There are rules for this, but I confess that I generally  go with what looks or sounds right rather than look up the rule. Call me rebel with a clause.

Commas are swell, but I like even better the authoritative colon: It says ta-dah, listen up, here comes a major point.  An example from “For the Love of Art”  in our November issue is,

“She explains it this way: ‘I realized immediately that the most important thing about the project was incorporating this amazing art into a living home.’”

A  friend of mine, Bob Byrne, quipped after surgery that appropriately enough for a writer, he now has a semicolon. In other nerdy literary-medical punnery, my late friend Mark Jones made much post-surgical merriment of his Willa Catheter.

And there, class, ends today’s lesson. More, you want more? Then check out Bill Walsh’s primer, Lapsing into a Comma. It’s cranky fun.

2 Responses to “Word Nerd: C is for comma”

1. March 4, 2010 at 8:51 pm, by Sharon

   What a great article! Now, can we do something about apostrophes? There is actually a store here in South Florida named Ladie’s Clothing. That’s not a person’s name. I have seen egregious mistakes even in online sites of the Washington Post and NY Times.

2. March 22, 2010 at 2:22 pm, by Rebecca Christian

   Hello, Sharon,

   I’m glad you are a member of the apostrophe police.

   I see them misused all the time.

   Rebecca