by Lynne Truss
Most of the marks used by those earnest scribes look bizarre to us now, of course: the positura, a mark like a number 7, which indicated the end of a piece of text; the sinister mark like the little gallows in a game of hangman that indicated the start of a paragraph (paragraphs weren’t indented until much later); and, significantly here, the virgula suspensiva, which looked like our present-day solidus or forward slash (/), and was used to mark the briefest pause or hesitation. 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.”
Now, 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 xl, 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)
Of course, if Hebrew or any of the other ancient languages had included punctuation (in the case of Hebrew, a few vowels might have been nice as well), two thousand years of scriptural exegesis need never have occurred, and a lot of clever, dandruffy people could definitely have spent more time in the fresh air. But there was no punctuation in those ancient texts and that’s all there is to it. For a considerable period in Latin transcriptions there were no gaps between words either, if you can credit such madness. Texts from that benighted classical period – just capital letters in big square blocks – look to modern eyes like those word-search puzzles that you stare at for twenty minutes or so, and then (with a delighted cry) suddenly spot the word “PAPERNAPKIN” spelled diagonally and backwards. However, the scriptio continua system (as it was called) had its defenders at the time. One fifth-century recluse called Cassian argued that if a text was slow to offer up its meaning, this encouraged not only healthy meditation but the glorification of God – the heart lifting in praise, obviously, at the moment when the word “PAPERNAPKIN” suddenly floated to the surface, like a synaptic miracle.
Isn’t this history interesting? Well, I think so – even though, for a considerable time, admittedly, not much happened. That imaginative chap Charlemagne (forward-looking Holy Roman Emperor) stirred things up in the 9th century when Alcuin of York came up with a system of positurae at the ends of sentences (including one of the earliest question marks), but to be honest western systems of punctuation were damned unsatisfactory for the next five hundred years until one man – one fabulous Venetian printer – finally wrestled with the issue and pinned it to the mat. That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn’t heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies.
The heroic status of Aldus Manutius the Elder among historians of the printed word cannot be overstated. Who invented the italic typeface? Aldus Manutius! Who printed the first semicolon? Aldus Manutius! The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required, and Aldus Manutius was the man to do it. In Pause and Effect (1992), Malcolm Parkes’s magisterial account of the history of punctuation in the West, facsimile examples of Aldus’s groundbreaking work include a page from Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna (1494) which features not only a very elegant roman typeface but the actual first semicolon (and believe me, this is exciting). Of course we did not get our modern system overnight, but Aldus Manutius and his grandson (conveniently of the same name) are generally credited with developing several of our modern conventional signs. They lowered the virgule and curved it, for a start, so that it began to look like the modern comma. They put colons and full stops at the ends of sentences. Like this. And also – less comfortably to the modern eye – like this:
Most significantly of all, however, they ignored the old marks that had aided the reader-aloud. Books were now for reading and understanding, not intoning. Moving your lips was becoming a no-no. Within the seventy years it took for Aldus Manutius the Elder to be replaced by Aldus Manutius the Younger, things changed so drastically that in 1566 Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax. Forget all that stuff about the spiritual value to the reader of working out the meaning for himself; forget as well the humility of those copyists of old. I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a famity that could invent italics.
So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. Commas, if you don’t whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job. Luckily the trend in the 20th century (starting with H. W. Fowler’s The King’s English in 1906) has been towards ever-simpler punctuation, with fewer and fewer commas; but take any passage from a non-contemporary writer and you can’t help seeing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been successfully corralled with the gate slammed shut by good old Comma the Sheepdog.
Jones flung himself at his benefactor’s feet, and taking eagerly hold of his hand, assured him, his goodness to him, both now, and at all other times, had so infinitely exceeded not only his merit, but his hopes, that no words could express his sense ofit.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749
It needed a quick eye to detect, from among the huddled mass of sleepers, the form of any given individual. As they lay closely packed together, covered, for warmth’s sake, with their patched and ragged clothes, little could be distinguished but the sharp outlines of pale faces, over which sombre light shed the same dull, heavy colour, with here and there a gaunt arm thrust forth, its thinness hidden by no covering, but fully exposed to view, in all its shrunken ugliness.
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1839
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. 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 learned 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 of mine 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.
* He shot, himself, as a child.
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. For example, in the introduction to this book (page 7) I allude to punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language: “they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop”. And, well, I argued for that Oxford comma. It seemed to me that without the comma after “detour”, this was a list of three instructions (the last a double one), not four. And here was a case where the stylistic reasons for its inclusion clearly outweighed the grammatical ones for taking it out. This was a decelerating sentence. The commas were incrementally applying the brakes. To omit the comma after “detour” would have the sentence suddenly coasting at speed again instead of slowing to the final halt.
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 feltlousy.
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?”
