Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [29]
Casement’s defence argued that, since Casement had not been adherent to the king’s enemies “in the realm” (indeed, on the contrary, had scrupulously conducted all his treasonous plotting abroad), he was not guilty. Now, I guarantee you can look at this set of words for hours at a stretch without seeing any virtue in this pathetic contention. Casement was clearly condemned by the phrase “or elsewhere”, regardless of how you punctuate it. However, two judges duly traipsed off to the Public Record Office to examine the original statute and discovered under a microscope a faint but helpful virgule after the second “realm” which apparently (don’t ask) cleared up the whole thing. Mr Justice Darling ruled that “giving aid and comfort to the king’s enemies” were words of apposition:
They are words to explain what is meant by being adherent to, and we think that if a man be adherent to the king’s enemies elsewhere, he is equally adherent to the king’s enemies, and if he is adherent to the king’s enemies, then he commits the treason which the statute of Edward III defines.
How this story ever got the sensational name “hanged on a comma”, however, is an interesting matter. “Tried to get off on a comma” is a more accurate representation of the truth.
A similar comma dispute still rages today, in a case with less explosive overtones. On his deathbed in April 1991, Graham Greene corrected and signed a typed document which restricts access to his papers at Georgetown University. Or does it? The document, before correction, stated:
I, Graham Greene, grant permission to Norman Sherry, my authorised biographer, excluding any other to quote from my copyright material published or unpublished.
Being a chap who had corrected proofs all his life, Greene automatically added a comma after “excluding any other” and died the next day without explaining what he intended by it. And a great ambiguity was thereby created. Are all other researchers excluded from quoting the material? Or only other biographers? The librarian at Georgetown interprets the document to mean that nobody besides Norman Sherry can consult the material at all. Meanwhile others, including Greene’s son, argue that the comma was carefully inserted by Greene only to indicate that Sherry was the sole authorised biographer. It is worth pointing out here, by the way, that legal English, with its hifalutin efforts to cover everything, nearly always ends up leaving itself semantically wide open like this, and that if Greene had been allowed to write either “Let Norman Sherry see the stuff and no one else” or, “Don’t let other biographers quote from it, but otherwise all are welcome”, none of this ridiculous palaver would have transpired.
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Airs and Graces
When I was about fourteen years old, a friend at school who spent the summer holidays in Michigan set me up with an American pen-pal. This is not an episode I am proud to remember. In fact, one day I hope to be able to forget it: the ensuing correspondence, after all, ran to only three pages, and no one from the Oxford University Press has, as yet, suggested collecting it in book form with scholarly apparatus and footnotes. But for the time being I need to get it off my chest, so here it is. The trouble was, Kerry-Anne was an everyday teenager with no literary pretensions – and for some reason this made the precocious blue-stocking in me feverishly uncomfortable. When her first letter arrived (she had pluckily set the ball rolling) I was absolutely appalled. It was in huge handwriting, like an infant’s. It was on pink paper, with carefree spelling errors – and where the dots over the I’s ought to be, there were bubbles. “I am strawberry blonde,” she wrote, “with a light dusting of freckles.” In hindsight I see it was unrealistic to expect a pen-pal from the 8th grade in Detroit to write like Samuel Johnson. But on the other hand, what earthly use to me was this vapid mousey moron parading a pig-mentational handicap?