Not just Oxford commas
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No cracks about "with whom".
Selected readings
- "Commas matter, Oxford and otherwise" (4/17/22) — with long bibliography
- "With whom he was speaking with" (12/21/09)
21 Comments »
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Haamu said,
June 25, 2024 @ 3:30 pm
This would have been funnier if Tyreke had posted it.
Viseguy said,
June 25, 2024 @ 4:57 pm
I feel you, David! But it's a losing/lost battle. (And somehow I doubt that Tyreke got the joke.)
Note to David: I had to read your quip two or three times to satisfy myself that you avoided a comma splice. You did. But watch out, it's a slippery slope.
David Morris said,
June 25, 2024 @ 6:57 pm
Wherefore art thou David?
JPL said,
June 25, 2024 @ 8:13 pm
David should have left out the comma in his reply.
Chris Button said,
June 26, 2024 @ 12:15 am
This one actually rubs me the wrong way as needless pedantry.
Personally I would like it if people only used the vocative comma when really necessary to avoid confusion. Same with the "Oxford" comma. If you don't really need it, then skip it (just like most people would skip it after "hello" followed by the addressee's name.
My personal pet peeve is the placement of commas invariably inside quotation marks regardless of context. I appreciate that is an established American vs British style difference though.
Peter Grubtal said,
June 26, 2024 @ 2:17 am
David's response was a justified jibe as a reaction to the questioner's pompous use of the obselete "whom".
Philip Taylor said,
June 26, 2024 @ 4:57 am
Obsolete, Peter ? In regular use in my idiolect, I can assure you. Although, of course, it would have been the third word of the question had I written it, not the second …
Robert Coren said,
June 26, 2024 @ 9:43 am
@Chris Button: Interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien, who was not exactly a modernist, eschewed the vocative comma throughout The Lord of the Rings. I found this slightly jarring at first, but I soon got used to it.
BZ said,
June 26, 2024 @ 9:43 am
@Chris Button,
I agree with you about the vocative comma in informal use (such as texting), but the Oxford comma has been drilled into me so hard by elementary school that any time it isn't there feels ambiguous to me
David Marjanović said,
June 26, 2024 @ 12:22 pm
Context disambiguates it in this and many other cases, but I have been confused on occasion by reading comma-less versions.
Keep in mind, too, that most commas aren't arbitrary conventions. They write intonation. The voice goes up where there's a comma. "Wherefore art thou Romeo" and "Where art thou, Romeo" don't have the same intonation at all.
I hate it when journals I'm trying to publish in insist on turning me into a liar by inserting commas or periods into stuff I quote from other people. Fortunately it's not ubiquitous in America.
Philip Taylor said,
June 26, 2024 @ 1:13 pm
David — « most commas aren't arbitrary conventions. They write intonation. The voice goes up where there's a comma. "Wherefore art thou Romeo" and "Where art thou, Romeo" don't have the same intonation at all. » — for me, a comma does not denote the point at which the voice goes up; rather, it denotes the point at which the speaker pauses. So in the Shakespeare question above, I would read "Where[fore] art thou, Romeo" as <low>Where[fore]</low> <high>art</high> <low>thou</low><pause>,</pause> <low>Romeo</low>.
My "where[fore]" indicates that I am assuming that the omission of "fore" at this point was a pure accident; if it was intentional, then I may have to re-cast my answer.
Chris Button said,
June 26, 2024 @ 2:05 pm
British:
It is called a "comma", and this is how it works.
American:
It is called a "comma," and this is how it works.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2024 @ 4:12 am
I can say with some confidence that "embedded punctuation" is not universal in America, Chris. A good friend and professional editor, Barbara Beeton, places punctuation outside of the quotation marks when such placement is required by the grammar. Example from recent e-mail —
Barbara lives in Rhode Island, and is American born-and-bred (with German ancestors on the maternal side).
M. Paul Shore said,
June 27, 2024 @ 5:09 am
Philip Taylor: David Marjanović’s writing of “Where art thou, Romeo?” was an intentional joke, a lampooning of those undereducated present-day readers who, not knowing what “wherefore” means, assume it’s merely an archaic variant of “where”, leading them to assume in turn that when Juliet says “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (note that there should be no pause after “thou” if the line is spoken as Shakespeare intended—thus the absence of the comma—a point missed by those aforementioned readers), she must be calling out into the darkness from her balcony attempting to discover his location. One sometimes sees depictions of this misinterpretation, with Juliet peering out into the void while Romeo stands unnoticed below. In retrospect, it was probably inadvisable for David Marjanović to wrap a grammatical illustration and a joke into one sentence-pair, as such a combination just leaves too much opportunity for confusion.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2024 @ 6:23 am
Ah, thank you MPS. I was unable to decide whether the "wherefore"/"where" change was intentional, and in the end decided not, but I now see that I was mistaken. Familiarity with "the whys and the wherefores" could help to clarify the meaning for those uncertain, but I suppose the idiom itself is now something of a rarity.
David Marjanović said,
June 27, 2024 @ 6:51 am
Not the point, no. Sorry, I should have been clearer. (Currently slowly recovering from COVID.)
Any pauses corresponding to commas are at most optional, though.
It's probably irrelevant; I omitted it because, as M. Paul Shore said, there seem to be hundreds of millions of people who believe that "wherefore art thou Romeo" means "where are you, Romeo" – it's a whole snowclone.
Philip Taylor said,
June 27, 2024 @ 7:25 am
David — (Hope you soon make a full recovery from COVID) — when you say "Any pauses corresponding to commas are at most optional, though", this raises two questions in my mind : (1) when transcribing spontaneous speech, and if the speaker is not manifesting verbal disfluencies, should pauses be transcribed as commas where heavier punctuation (e.g., semi-colon, colon, em-dash, full stop / period, parenthesis) would be grammatically incorrect ? And if so, when reading from such a transcript, should not the presence of commas therein be indicated by a spoken pause ?
Andrew Usher said,
June 27, 2024 @ 7:54 am
The so-called 'American' punctuation style rule is only enforced in (most) edited writing, and virtually never seen an unedited writing (except by those that have trained themselves into it). Almost everyone will oppose the rule if they notice it at all, because it makes no sense. Likewise not using the serial comma should be considered an obsolete style rule that doesn't make sense.
The original and main purpose of punctuation is so represent the spoken intonation more accurately; the secondary purpose, to indicate even better than speech does what logically goes with what. If I can say all of these:
"bacon and eggs and toast"
"bacon and eggs, and toast"
"bacon, and eggs, and toast"
"bacon, eggs, [and] toast"
"bacon, [and] eggs and toast"
(there may be other options; the last indicates that "eggs and toast" are a thing being spoken of) I should be able to write them.
The phrase 'wherefore art thou Romeo', is, of course, topical as it illustrates the vocative comma – here, its lack – making a difference, and for the same reasons it should not be omitted.
On the other hand, a comma after 'hello', mentioned in this thread, is unnecessary as 'hello' can only ever be an interjection. Still, I think I use it.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
M. Paul Shore said,
June 27, 2024 @ 1:01 pm
Once again, my eagerness to leap into the discussion tripped me up: I should not have criticized the visualizations of the R & J balcony scene that I referred to, because those visualizations in and of themselves are consistent with the play’s text, although unquestionably often misunderstood. In the play, Romeo, unperceived by Juliet, first gazes at her on her balcony and softly soliloquizes; then Juliet, continuing to not notice him, speaks her own soliloquy; finally Romeo speaks out loud to her and their conversation begins.
Andrew Usher: I have to disagree with your statement that “[t]he phrase 'wherefore art thou Romeo' [. . .] illustrates the vocative comma—here, its lack—making a difference, and for the same reasons it should not be omitted”, since that statement implies that “wherefore art thou, Romeo” would also be a meaningful phrase, just with a different meaning—whereas in fact, for all practical purposes it’s gibberish. “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” would translate into present-day English as “Why are you, Romeo?”. Why are you what?
Philip Taylor said,
June 28, 2024 @ 7:56 am
Well, there is a possible interpretation of "Wherefore art thou, Romeo" (= "Why are you, Romeo") and that is that the speaker is asking Romeo why he exists. OK, a very unlikely scenario, I would be the first to admit, but given that almost everything these days is said to be an "existential crisis", I think that one could admit of that as a possible interpretation.
M. Paul Shore said,
June 28, 2024 @ 10:40 am
Philip Taylor: Yes, I thought of that possible interpretation, which is why I was careful to say that “wherefore art thou, Romeo/why are you, Romeo” is gibberish for all practical purposes. Sometimes, at least, I succeed in formulating my statements carefully and properly before I post them!