Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [26]
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 felt lousy.
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?”
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,