10/13/2024
Let’s Eat Gramma
This is number eighty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“PUT A COMMA wherever you’d pause when speaking” has to be the worst instruction I ever received from an English teacher. And, in fact, if you look through books and magazines published in the late-1800s and early 1900s, you’ll find pages peppered with the little curved punctuation marks. Some publications look like someone spilled the bottle of them and didn’t clean up.
“But that’s where I pause when talking.”
So what? If you consciously listen to people speaking, you’ll find they pause at all kinds of places that make no sense at all. Pauses are simply a speech pattern and don’t necessarily add meaning to most sentences. Further, people speaking often have no sentence structure at all, and might run-on for an entire page without breathing. Commas are hardly a help there.
There are, actually, places where a comma adds meaning and lessens confusion. In the title of this blog post, adding a comma between ‘eat’ and ‘Gramma’ will save a life.
A panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. When it arrives he eats it and turns to the door. He pulls a gun, fires two shots into the air, and walks out. The waiter, puzzled by the behavior, picks up a poorly punctuated pamphlet left on the table which says: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
This is a quote taken from a bar joke told by author Ursula LeGuin. Author Lynn Truss wrote a popular grammar book titled after the joke, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
The proper meaning, of course, is that “eats” is a verb. “Shoots and leaves” are object nouns—what the panda eats. But with the added comma, the sentence becomes three verbs. To eat. To shoot. To leave.
Another popular saying is “Let’s eat, kids” vs. “Let’s eat kids.” One will leave you fed, the other will leave you dead. Commas save lives.
These examples show that the addition of a comma can change the meaning drastically, but so also can the omission of a comma.
When I wrote the Strange Art series, starting with Art Something, I had to make some decisions regarding voice and tone that were assisted by punctuation. Art is somewhere on the spectrum. He’s smart and knows words, but has difficulty speaking them when called upon. As he says, “My throat was closing up on me and words were like balloons that were all let go at the same time and I was running back and forth trying to catch one.”
With that sentence as an example, omitting a comma before the conjunction “and,” where it could have gone, enhances the sense of Art’s frustration in trying to get words out. When I was just beginning to work with one of my editors, he put commas in before every occurrence of “and,” “but,” or “or.” They don’t belong before many of those occurrences, but how do you decide? In a compound sentence like the one above, there are three distinct subjects and three distinct verbs. In other words, I could have put in periods after each sentence. “My throat was closing up on me. Words were like balloons that were all let go at the same time. I was running back and forth trying to catch one.” But the flow of Art’s desperation and frustration would not be as obvious.
Still, those technically could have been separated by commas. On the other hand, a sentence that has a single subject and two verbs would usually not require a comma. “Tom ran after Princess and chased her all the way to town.” No comma required in this dog-chase.
Separating independent clauses is a good use for a comma. Separating dependent clauses is not a good use for a comma.
Art Something and the entire Strange Art series are available as a collection or individual eBooks at Bookapy.
Of course, the best place to use a comma is when separating a list of things, whether nouns or verbs or sometimes adjectives. When we consider this, we often run into what is known as the serial or Oxford comma. I am a proponent of the Oxford comma when it is needed to clarify a list. I believe the only style guide that encourages not using it is the AP Style Guide, which is written to save space in the narrow columns of a typical newspaper.
“Tom likes Sue, Mary, and Leslie.” These are three proper nouns that might not be confused without the comma, but the meaning is clearer with it.
“I’d like to thank my parents, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.” Here, the series is confusing. Is the speaker the son of Robert and Emily? Or is he thanking his parents and two famous poets? A comma before the “and” would make the sentence clear.
“John mounted his horse, drew his gun, and rode off in all directions.” In this instance, we have three verb phrases separated by commas. Omitting the comma before “and” would give the impression there is something more in common between drawing and riding than there is between them and mounting.
That brings me to the subject of a list of adjectives. Many people place commas between every pair of adjectives in a list. But commas are only needed when the adjectives are of a similar category. What do I mean? I’ll try to explain.
When using multiple adjectives in an English sentence, the correct order to follow is:
- 1. Determiner (e.g., a, an, the, your, each)
- 2. Quantity (e.g., one, three, many, few)
- 3. Opinion (e.g., ugly, cute, precious)
- 4. Size (e.g., big, small, tiny)
- 5. Age (e.g., young, old)
- 6. Shape (e.g., round, square, rectangular)
- 7. Color (e.g., red, pink, orange)
- 8. Origin (e.g., American, South African, Korean)
- 9. Material (e.g., silk, plastic, wooden)
- 10. Purpose or qualifier (e.g., wedding dress, travel journal)
If multiple adjectives are used in this order, no comma is needed.
“He was a handsome young South American man.”
On the other hand, if using adjectives that fall into a single category above, it is common to use commas to separate them.
“He was an ugly, despicable, dishonest old man.”
All three adjectives, “ugly, despicable, dishonest” could be classed as “opinion.” Note there is no comma between “dishonest” and “old” because they are in different categories.
Changing the order of adjectives from the order they appear in the list will almost invariably sound wrong, even though it is sometimes done.
“It was a linen, orange, antique napkin.” Compare with “It was an antique orange linen napkin.” Even with commas in the first sentence it still sounds awkward.
Is this an exhaustive list of when to use commas? Heavens, no! There are the use of commas to set off an introductory or appositive phrase, the use of a comma to separate a direct quotation from its attribute, separating a participle phrase from the remainder of the sentence, after the salutation or closing of an informal letter, and wherever the sense of the statement is clarified by using a comma.
I will comment on some additional grammar issues in the next post. It will likely be a mishmash of several so-called rules that I find misapplied or ignored. You guessed it: “Synonym roles like grammar used to make.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
