I recently borrowed a book from the San Miguel public library; About Face, a mystery novel by Donna Leon. As I read, I noticed there were tiny blotches scattered about on each page. At first I thought it was a cheap edition, and the printer had over-inked the plates or something – before realizing that the kind of printing I was imagining hasn’t existed since about 1885. When I looked closer, I saw that the blotches appeared only where there were commas in the text. For example, in the sentence – “The family had come from Friuli some time in the last century, had prospered during the Fascist era, and had become even richer during the great boom of the sixties” – the comma after the word “era” had been blotched out. Later, in, “Coffee came, and then a waiter moved around the table pushing a wheeled tray,” the comma after “came” was blotched.
I realized that a previous reader of the novel, a real stickler for by-the-book punctuation, had taken a black pen and eliminated what he or she considered to be unnecessary or incorrect commas. All of the eradicated commas came before the word “and,” even when the comma had been separating two independent clauses: “Brunetti nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and they left the office.” Comma after “speak” blotched out. Sometimes the Stickler would deface one comma in a sentence and leave another untouched, even though the elimination of the first should have dictated the deletion of the second: “My father has made money all his life, thus permitting me, and our children, the luxury of not having to take an interest in making it.” Comma after “me” blotched out, but not the one after “children.” And sometimes they were just flat-out wrong, eliminating commas that even the most ardent anti-serial-comma fanatic would agree had to be left in: “‘Earth-moving equipment,’ the Conte said with singular lack of enthusiasm, ‘and other things.’” The Stickler had taken out the comma after “enthusiasm,” which makes no sense at all.
I do, however, sympathize with the Stickler. There are a lot of “and”s in any book, and Donna Leon had dropped in a comma before just about all of them. I don’t consider it amounts to comma abuse, and I have read many novels by Donna Leon without feeling the need to reach for a blue pencil. She writes with a flowing grace and has an impeccable sense of rhythm. But I applaud anyone who feels so strongly about grammar that they are willing to make editorial emendations to a book that no one in any position to do anything about them is ever likely to see. The Stickler was blowing redundant commas out of the text purely for their own satisfaction. And maybe a subsequent reader’s edification.
As a former copyeditor myself, I understand that itch. A few years ago, I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynn Truss’s best-selling salvo across the bows of punctuation abuse. Lynn Truss is punctually punctilious about punctuation. She would like my Stickler. She writes that the sight of a misplaced comma or apostrophe can “trigger a ghastly emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated.” The stages run from shock to disbelief to pain to anger. “Finally,” she writes, “anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.”
After reading her book, my wife Merilyn and I began to notice abuses everywhere, and misplaced apostrophes and commas did indeed induce in us a righteous urge. Driving along a country road, for example, we would see signs nailed to trees, pointing down leafy lanes towards a lake: “The Robinson’s,” the signs would say, or “The Smith’s.”
“The Robinson’s what?” we would exclaim in unison. “The Smith’s what?”
On restaurant menus we would eschew items described as “Our ‘garden fresh’ chef’s salad.” Is the salad garden fresh, or is it “garden-fresh” in the way that an investment in cryptocurrency can be “highly volatile”? We also avoided restaurants that claimed to serve “Good Food at It’s Best!” I thought about carrying paints and brushes with me so that I could restore grammar to road signs. I would either change “Smiths Falls” to “Smith’s Falls,” or make it into a sentence: “Smiths Fall.”
But I got over it. Down here in Mexico, where restaurant menus are typically translated into English (often by Google Translate, so not exactly into English, but close), one would think commas and apostrophes would be the least of the Stickler’s concerns. And indeed, the Stickler did go on to line editing, overriding Donna Leon’s disdain for the conditional tense, and in one case amending her preference for “deep-set eyes” to “deeply set eyes.”
But the Stickler persevered with the commas. I think the Stickler must have read the first line, and only the first line, of the “Comma” entry in the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (also in the San Miguel library), which states: “In general, do not use a comma before and in a series unless the other elements of the series are separated by a semicolon.” Donna Leon also disdains the semicolon, and so the Stickler went to town on her commas.
I would draw the Stickler’s attention to the NYTMSU’s use of the phrase “in general,” for when it comes to commas, very few are carved in stone. I fear the Stickler would not have added a second comma to the sentence: “The dinner guests included the Baxters, who ate the roast beef and Uncle Ted.” Rightly regarded, commas act like rests in music. Rests tell the horn section when they can breathe, and commas tell the reader the same thing. Donna Leon’s prose, after the Stickler had at it, sounded breathless: “Had Patta perhaps been hibernating in a cave somewhere while the Camorra moved north and had he awoken to discover it only this morning?” As a reader, I need to take a breath after “north,” if only to try to figure out who the Camorra are, and to picture the oafish Vice-Questore Patto sleeping in a cave like an Italian Rip van Winkle. A comma adds a beat to a sentence, during which the beauty and often the meaning of the prose sinks in.
As much as I sympathize with the Stickler and liked reading Lynn Truss, I enjoy reading Donna Leon more.
Thanks, Heather. And I'm glad you put a comma after "post."
I guess the Attorney General is the AG for the United States, plural. But there is no such reasoning behind States Attorney. A few years ago, in Canada, the government went around and took the apostrophes out of all place names: hence Smiths Falls, Chaffeys Lock, etc. Why? To save paint? Actually, I probably wouldn't object so strongly if that were the reason.