Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

  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.

  However, why is it that sometimes these pairs of commas are incorrect? One Telegraph correspondent wrote to complain about a frequent newspaper solecism, and the example he gave was, “The leading stage director, Nicholas Hytner, has been appointed to the Royal National Theatre.” Shouldn’t the commas be removed in cases such as this, he asked? Well, yes. Absolutely. For a start, if you removed the name “Nicholas Hytner” from this particular sentence, it would make no sense at all. But there is a larger grammatical point here, too. Consider the difference between:

  The people in the queue who managed to get tickets were very satisfied.

  and:

  The people in the queue, who managed to get tickets, were very satisfied.

  In the first case, the reader infers from the absence of commas that not everyone in the queue was fortunate. Some people did not get tickets. (The ones who did were, naturally, cock-a-hoop.) In the second version everyone in the queue gets tickets, hurrah, and I just hope it turned out to be for something nice. The issue here is whether the bit between the commas is “defining” or not. If the clause is “defining”, you don’t need to present it with a pair of commas. Thus:

  The Highland Terriers that live in our street aren’t cute at all.

  If the information in the clause is “non-defining”, however, then you do:

  The Highland Terriers, when they are barking, are a nightmare.

  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 only see 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 we can see in those examples from 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.

  The big final rule for the comma is one that you won’t find in any books by grammarians. It is quite easy to remember, however. The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it. More than any other mark, the comma requires the writer to use intelligent discretion and to be simply alert to potential ambiguity. For example:

  1 Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual.

  2 The driver managed to escape from the vehicle before it sank and swam to the river-bank.

  3 Don’t guess, use a timer or watch.

  4 The convict said the judge is mad.

  In the first example, of course, the comma has been misplaced and belongs after “on”. The second example suggests that the vehicle swam to the river-bank, rather than the passenger. It requires a comma after “sank”. The third is pretty interesting, since it actually conveys the opposite of its intended meaning. What it appears to say is, “Don’t guess, or use a timer or a watch”, when in fact it only wants to tell you not to guess. It therefore requires a semicolon or even a full stop after “guess”, rather than a comma. The fourth makes perfect sense, of course – unless what’s intended is: “The convict, said the judge, is mad.”

  Two particular stupid uses of the comma are proliferating and need to be noted. One is the comma memorably described in the “This English” column of the New Statesman in the late 1970s as “the yob’s comma”: “The yob’s comma, of course, has no syntactical value: it is the equivalent of a fuddled gasp for breath, as the poor writer marshals his battered thoughts.” Examples cited in the New Statesman included this, from The Guardian:

  The society decided not to prosecute the owners of the Windsor Safari Park, where animals, have allegedly been fed live to snakes and lions, on legal advice.

  The comma after “animals” is not only ungrammatical and intrusive, but throws the end of the sentence (“on legal advice”) into complete semantic chaos. Meanwhile, moronic sentences such as “Parents, are being urged to take advantage of a scheme designed to prevent children getting lost in supermarkets” and “What was different back then, was if you disagreed with the wrong group, you could end up with no head!” are observably on the increase.

  Less stoppable is the drift towards American telegraphese in news headlines, where the comma is increasingly given the job of replacing the word “and”. Thus:

  UK study spurns al-Qaeda, Iraq link

  Mother, three sons die in farm fire

  So that’s nearly it for the comma. Although it is n
ot true that the legal profession has historically eschewed commas altogether, one begins to realise there is a sensible reason for its traditional wariness. It is sometimes said, for instance, that Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916), the Irish would-be insurrectionist, was actually “hanged on a comma”, which you have to admit sounds like a bit of very rough justice, though jolly intriguing. How do you get hanged on a comma, exactly? Doesn’t the rope keep slipping off? Well, having landed in Ireland in 1916 from a German submarine, Casement was arrested and charged under the Treason Act of 1351, whereupon his defence counsel opted to argue a point of punctuation – which is the last refuge of the scoundrel, of course; but never mind, you can’t blame the chap, it must have seemed worth a go. His point was that the Treason Act was not only written in Norman French but was unpunctuated, and was thus open to interpretation. The contested words in question, translated literally, were:

  If a man be adherent to the king’s enemies in his realm giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere …

  Casement’s defence argued that, since Casement had not been adherent to the king’s enemies “in the realm” (indeed, on the contrary, had scrupulously conducted all his treasonous plotting abroad), he was not guilty. Now, I guarantee you can look at this set of words for hours at a stretch without seeing any virtue in this pathetic contention. Casement was clearly condemned by the phrase “or elsewhere”, regardless of how you punctuate it. However, two judges duly traipsed off to the Public Record Office to examine the original statute and discovered under a microscope a faint but helpful virgule after the second “realm” which apparently (don’t ask) cleared up the whole thing. Mr Justice Darling ruled that “giving aid and comfort to the king’s enemies” were words of apposition:

  They are words to explain what is meant by being adherent to, and we think that if a man be adherent to the king’s enemies elsewhere, he is equally adherent to the king’s enemies, and if he is adherent to the king’s enemies, then he commits the treason which the statute of Edward III defines.

  How this story ever got the sensational name “hanged on a comma”, however, is an interesting matter. “Tried to get off on a comma” is a more accurate representation of the truth.

  A similar comma dispute still rages today, in a case with less explosive overtones. On his deathbed in April 1991, Graham Greene corrected and signed a typed document which restricts access to his papers at Georgetown University. Or does it? The document, before correction, stated:

  I, Graham Greene, grant permission to Norman Sherry, my authorised biographer, excluding any other to quote from my copyright material published or unpublished.

  Being a chap who had corrected proofs all his life, Greene automatically added a comma after “excluding any other” and died the next day without explaining what he intended by it. And a great ambiguity was thereby created. Are all other researchers excluded from quoting the material? Or only other biographers? The librarian at Georgetown interprets the document to mean that nobody besides Norman Sherry can consult the material at all. Meanwhile others, including Greene’s son, argue that the comma was carefully inserted by Greene only to indicate that Sherry was the sole authorised biographer. It is worth pointing out here, by the way, that legal English, with its hifalutin efforts to cover everything, nearly always ends up leaving itself semantically wide open like this, and that if Greene had been allowed to write either “Let Norman Sherry see the stuff and no one else” or, “Don’t let other biographers quote from it, but otherwise all are welcome”, none of this ridiculous palaver would have transpired.

  *

  Airs and Graces

  When I was about fourteen years old, a friend at school who spent the summer holidays in Michigan set me up with an American pen-pal. This is not an episode I am proud to remember. In fact, one day I hope to be able to forget it: the ensuing correspondence, after all, ran to only three pages, and no one from the Oxford University Press has, as yet, suggested collecting it in book form with scholarly apparatus and footnotes. But for the time being I need to get it off my chest, so here it is. The trouble was, Kerry-Anne was an everyday teenager with no literary pretensions – and for some reason this made the precocious blue-stocking in me feverishly uncomfortable. When her first letter arrived (she had pluckily set the ball rolling) I was absolutely appalled. It was in huge handwriting, like an infant’s. It was on pink paper, with carefree spelling errors – and where the dots over the I’s ought to be, there were bubbles. “I am strawberry blonde,” she wrote, “with a light dusting of freckles.” In hindsight I see it was unrealistic to expect a pen-pal from the 8th grade in Detroit to write like Samuel Johnson. But on the other hand, what earthly use to me was this vapid mousey moron parading a pigmentational handicap?

  To this day I am ashamed of what I did to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can’t remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word “desultory”, and I think I may even have used some French. Pretentious? Well, to adapt Gustave Flaubert’s famous identification with Emma Bovary, “Adrian Mole, âgé de treize ans et trois quarts … c’est moi.” The main reason I recall this shameful teenage epiphany, however, is that in my mission to blast little Kerry-Anne out of the water, I pulled out (literally) all the stops: I used a semicolon. “I watch television in a desultory kind of way; I find there is not much on,” I wrote. And it felt so good, you know. It felt fantastic. It was like that bit in Crocodile Dundee when our rugged hero scoffs at the switchblade of his would-be mugger, and produces a foot-long weapon of his own, “Call that a knife? THAT’S a KNIFE.”

  In this chapter I want to examine punctuation as an art. Naturally, therefore, this is where the colon and semicolon waltz in together, to a big cheer from all the writers in the audience. Just look at those glamorous punctuation marks twirling in the lights from the glitter-ball: are they not beautiful? Are they not graceful? Ask professional writers about punctuation and they will not start striking the board about the misuse of the apostrophe; instead they will jabber in a rather breathless manner about the fate of the semicolon. Is it endangered? What will we do if it disappears? Have you noticed that newspapers use it less and less? Save the semicolon! It is essential to our craft! But their strength of attachment is justified. Taking the marks we have examined so far, is there any art involved in using the apostrophe? No. Using the apostrophe correctly is a mere negative proof: it tells the world you are not a thicko. The comma, while less subject to universal rules, is still a utilitarian mark, racing about with its ears back, trying to serve both the sense and the sound of the sentence – and of course wearing itself to a frazzle for a modest bowl of Chum. Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader, but it does not mark you out as a master of your craft.

  But colons and semicolons – well, they are in a different league, my dear! They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes – that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity – well, they are the colons and semicolons. If you don’t believe me, ask Virginia Woolf:

  As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had
left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous.

  Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925

  Look at that sentence fly. Amazing. The way it stays up like that. Would anyone mind if I ate the last sandwich?

  Of course, nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.” Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”. Fay Weldon says she positively dislikes semicolons, “which is odd, because I don’t dislike anybody really”. Meanwhile, that energetic enemy to all punctuation Gertrude Stein (remember she said the comma was “servile”?) said that semicolons suppose themselves superior to the comma, but are mistaken:

  They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.

  Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 1935

  But how much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all. I say they are just show-offs. And I say it’s wonderful that when Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983) he cheerfully explained (so the apocryphal story goes) that the machine he typed The Name of the Rose on simply didn’t have a semicolon, so it was slightly unwise of this earnest chap to make too much of it.