According to one legend, the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement, convicted of treason for supporting the Irish rebellion, was “hanged on a comma.” But that's wrong, the comma didn't kill him.
During World War I, Casement was charged with violating the 1351 Treason Act (25 Edw. III, c. 5), which outlaws regicide along with three other crimes: waging war against England; supporting a domestic rebellion; or giving aid and comfort to England’s enemies, foreign or domestic. According to the Act, it is treason
if a Man do levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King’s Enemies in his Realm, giving to them Aid and Comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere.
Casement did not deny the facts in the case: that in 1914, after the start of World War I, he traveled to New York to ask German diplomats to sell guns to Irish revolutionaries to support the Easter Rising. That later, on a trip to Germany he obtained a government statement supporting Ireland’s independence. And that while in Germany he recruited Irish prisoners of war to fight against the English.
Casement wanted his barrister to argue that these acts weren’t treasonous, since the Irish were not even English. But Sargent Alexander Sullivan took a narrower approach, arguing instead that the statute’s final limiting phrase, “in the Realm, or elsewhere,” applied only to giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The other infractions, levying war and adhering to the King’s enemies, only covered acts committed at home. And since Casement was abroad when he rebelled against England, and he had not given aid and comfort to the enemy either at home or abroad, the Treason Act simply did not apply.
But after much quibbling over the scope of “in the Realm, or elsewhere,” including a detailed back and forth to determine if the Act’s punctuation supported Sullivan’s interpretation, the court found Casement guilty and sentenced him to hang.
Frustrated by his lawyer’s focus on a close and tortured interpretation which relied on punctuation, Casement later complained from jail, “God deliver me from such antiquaries as these, to hang a man’s life upon a comma and throttle him with a semi-colon.” Seeing an opportunity too good to be missed, language purists quickly rewrote that story, having Casement complain instead that he was being “hanged on a comma.”
Language purists are convinced that a comma in the wrong place will kill you. When they’re not trotting out Roger Casement to prove their point, they offer the classic punctuation kills example: the difference between “Let’s eat, grandma” and “Let’s eat grandma.”
Only commas don't kill. The version without the comma is only funny because no one in their right mind thinks it’s an invitation to cannibalism.
A comma—or its absence—didn’t hang Roger Casement either. The court in R. v. Casement knew that the punctuation in the original version of the 1351 Treason Act—which was written in Norman French, not English—was inconsistent. They weren’t even sure whether some of the punctuation marks were actually ink blots or dirt on the parchment. They knew as well that the different versions of the English translations of the statute punctuated it differently. And they knew that twentieth-century punctuation conventions could not easily apply to fourteenth-century texts. As the Lord Chief Justice put it tersely during the trial, “Commas have no place in the discussion before this Court” (George H. Knott, ed., The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, 1917, p. 122).
So confused and changeable are English punctuation practices that one of the best-known 18th-century English grammarians, Robert Lowth, had to admit that English punctuation was so imperfect that “few precise rules can be given; but much must be left to the judgement and taste of the writer.” Punctuation was even less perfect in 1351.
Before his arrest for treason, Roger Casement had been a highly-respected British diplomat, knighted for his work exposing Belgian colonial atrocities in the Congo and Peruvian mistreatment of the Putumayo. Two things led to Casement’s death, neither one of them punctuation-related: he did not deny doing what he did to secure an independent Ireland, and what may have been even worse in the eyes of the law at the time, he was gay. The English authorities destroyed Casement just as they destroyed other Irish independence fighters, and just as they had earlier destroyed Oscar Wilde and would later destroy Alan Turing.
As for the Treason Act, it has not been updated since 1351, and it is not much used today. The most notorious prosecution for treason was Guy Fawkes and the other perpetrators of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and the last prosecution for treason occurred in 1945. An update and revision of the law might clarify the statute’s scope, but Parliament can't even deal with Brexit, let alone tinker with a seldom-used law.
Of course improving the language of an unwieldy or confusing statute is always a great idea. If our laws were crystal clear, or even just a little less ambiguous, lawyers and judges would have a lot more time for golf or social media. Nonetheless, R. v. Casement furnishes an important grammar lesson: commas don’t kill people, people kill people.
------
For the whole story on gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, click to order your copy of my new book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’
