Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [24]
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 noncontemporary 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 of it.
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”).*