There’s a pedant at my university who likes to stand on the Quad, wave a grammar book at passers-by, and warn them that a comma can mean the difference between life and death. He or she points an accusing finger at some poor soul and makes them fix the commas in their term paper.
You’d better get those commas right, pedants like to warn, because “Commas save lives,” an eternal truth they illustrate with the life-and-death Parable of the Dinner Guest:
- Let’s eat, grandpa.
- Let’s eat grandpa.
Don’t let the pedants sucker you with their scary comma talk. There is no one in their right mind who reads the second example as an invitation to cannibalism. That’s why it’s funny. Otherwise, to paraphrase Hamlet, if supper, for grandpa, really is not where he eats, but where he is eaten, then it’s not time to laugh, it’s time to call 9-1-1.
But commas are still important, right? the pedant asks, rhetorically. Maybe not life or death, but what about in your term paper? or in the law? That’s a kind of metaphoric life-or-death, isn’t it? your neighborhood pedant would argue. Then they’ll take great pleasure in telling you a federal court just ruled that, because lawmakers forgot a comma, a bunch of milk-truck drivers in Maine will now get the overtime pay that their bosses had been refusing to pay them.
"Told you so, told you so, told you so," the pedant shrieks while jumping up and down—ignoring William Strunk’s admonition to omit needless words. That’s Strunk of Strunk and White, who wrote the pedants’ bible, The Elements of Style. Strunk repeated everything he told his Cornell students three times. He chanted, “Omit needless words. Omit needless words. Omit needless words.” There wasn't much class discussion, and he had to fill the fifty minutes with something.
Anyway, don’t let the pedants sucker you with this talk of comma law: the federal court did no such thing. It’s true that, in O’Connor, et. al., v. Oakhurst Dairy (16-1901 2017), the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals praised the precision of the Oxford comma for items that are listed in a series, but the court also acknowledged that the state of Maine’s guidelines for drafting statutes recommends omitting needless punctuation:
When drafting Maine law or rules, don’t use a comma between the penultimate and the last item of a series.
The Oxford comma, sometimes called the serial comma, is the comma before a conjunction in series of three or more items. The Maine statute on wages and hours omits the serial comma, because that’s what they do in Maine, a state where people use few words, and fewer commas. According to the state's wages and hours statute, workers engaged in any one of these activities don’t qualify for overtime pay:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.
Note that there is no comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution.” A comma before “or” would be an “Oxford comma,” and it would indicate that “packing for shipment” and “distribution” are two separate activities, both ineligible for overtime compensation.
The milk-truck drivers claimed that with no Oxford comma, “packing for shipment or distribution” is one single activity. Which means that the wages and hours law exempts anyone involved in “packing for shipment or distribution” from overtime. Since drivers do no packing for shipment, distribution, or anything else, they should get overtime pay if they work more than forty hours a week.
The dairy owners disagreed, claiming that even without the serial comma, the only sensible way to read the statute is to treat “packing for shipment” as one activity, and “distribution” as another. Workers involved in “packing for shipment” don’t get overtime. Workers who distribute—drivers, in other words—don’t get it either.
In reaching its decision, the court discussed conventions of punctuation, gerunds (basically words like canning, marketing and packing, which end in –ing), the style of statutory language, and what to do about items in a series, and it concluded that the law was, indeed, ambiguous. But it found that linguistic analysis didn’t help to resolve that ambiguity:
The text has, to be candid, not gotten us very far. . . . [It] turns out to be no clearer on close inspection than it first appeared.
In other words, looking at the commas in the law won’t tell you what it means.
Think about that. I’ll say it again, looking at the commas in the law won’t tell you what it means. Don’t worry, I won’t say it a third time, but I will say, that’s quite a statement for a court to make: punctuation doesn’t count.
But I’m not surprised. Robert Lowth, who wrote a very popular eighteenth-century grammar book in which he laid down a lot of rules that pedants try to follow even today, threw up his hands in dismay when it came to making rules for punctuation. He called punctuation imperfect and said, “few precise rules can be given, which will hold without exception” -- after all, Oxford likes the Oxford comma, but the state of Maine does not. And he concluded, “much must be left to the judgement and taste of the writer” -- for example, we would never put a comma between given and which the way that Robert Lowth did.
The O’Connor court concluded that, if looking at the grammar and punctuation of a law, or the definitions of its individual words, doesn’t tell us what it means, then looking at its purpose will. The purpose of the overtime law is to guarantee workers extra pay for extra work. In addition, Maine law requires that
ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose.
Sorry, pedants, the court found for the milk-truck drivers, not because of commas, but because the purpose of the law was to remedy the plight of workers forced to work long hours, and so it was the right thing to do.
And back to Lowth for a moment. Here’s another eighteenth-century example, this time from the Constitution, where commas seem arbitrary, where their presence or absence makes no difference. When Congress passed the Second Amendment, the one about the right to bear arms, it had three commas:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
But the versions of the Second Amendment ratified by the individual states had anywhere from one to three commas, and one version apparently had zero commas. Even so, no one contests the fact that the states approved the amendment, which became part of the Constitution in 1791. People do disagree about the meaning of the Second Amendment, but it means the same thing whether it has one, two, or three commas, or none at all.
You can tell that to your neighborhood pedant the next time they try to correct your commas. Only don't do it if they’re bearing arms. Unless you want to become yet another statistic in the never-ending cycle of comma life and death.
