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into buying something. Well, he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctuation vigilantes are on the loose. We lovers of the apostrophe will not stand by and let it be abolished – not because we are dinosaurs who drink tea out of saucers (interesting image) but because we appreciate the way the apostrophe has for centuries graced our words and illuminated our meaning. It is no fault of the apostrophe that some of our words need so much help identifying themselves. Indeed, it is to the credit of the apostrophe that it can manage the task. Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended. The next day after the abolition of the apostrophe, imagine the scene. Triumphant abolitionist sits down to write, “Goodbye to the Apostrophe: we’re not missing you a bit!” and finds that he can’t. Abolish the apostrophe and it will be necessary, before the hour is up, to reinvent it.

* * *

That’ll Do, Comma

When the humorist James Thurber was writing for New Yorker editor Harold Ross in the 1930s and 1940s, the two men often had very strong words about commas. It is pleasant to picture the scene: two hard-drinking alpha males in serious trilbies smacking a big desk and barking at each other over the niceties of punctuation. According to Thurber’s account of the matter (in The Years with Ross [1959]), Ross’s “clarification complex” tended to run somewhat to the extreme: he seemed to believe there was no limit to the amount of clarification you could achieve if you just kept adding commas. Thurber, by self-appointed virtuous contrast, saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability. And so they endlessly disagreed. If Ross were to write “red, white, and blue” with the maximum number of commas, Thurber would defiantly state a preference for “red white and blue” with none at all, on the provocative grounds that “all those commas make the flag seem rained on. They give it a furled look.”

If you want to know about editorial “commaphilia” as a source of chronic antagonism, read The Years with Ross. Thurber once went so far as to send Ross a few typed lines of one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, repunctuated in New Yorker style:

She lived, alone, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be,

But, she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference, to me.

But Ross, it seems, was unmoved by sarcasm, and in the end Thurber simply had to resign himself to Ross’s way of thinking. After all, he was the boss; he signed the cheques; and of course he was a brilliant editor, who endearingly admitted once in a letter to H. L. Mencken, “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.” And so the comma proliferated. Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

Why the problem? Why the scope for such differences of opinion? Aren’t there rules for the comma, just as there are rules for the apostrophe? Well, yes; but you will be entertained to discover that there is a significant complication in the case of the comma. More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:

1 To illuminate the grammar of a sentence

2 To point up – rather in the manner of musical notation – such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow

This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on – indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time. In 1582, Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (an