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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