Language Log

Save that comma!

While we were celebrating the awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to William Safire, Eric Bakovic, searching for a suitable photo, discovered that back in June 2005, Bill received the Guardian of Zion Award.  In the story on this award in Voices magazine, we find that Bill is apparently the author of "the dictionary":

It took me a moment to see what had gone awry here: the problem is the punctuation.

It helped that I happened to know that The New Language of Politics is in fact a dictionary; its subtitle is A Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans and Political Usage.  So the writer's intention surely was that "The New Language of Politics" should be in apposition to "the dictionary"; there are three conjuncts, not four (and from now on, I'll italicize all book titles just to make things visually clearer, except when directly quoting from the Voices article):

Now there are two ways to punctuate appositive proper names: either with no punctuation at all —

or with commas flanking the appositive —

(the second comma is suppressed at the end of a sentence, as in "an anthology of great speeches, Lend Me Your Ears.", in the quotation above).

Advice varies on when to use commas and when not — no, Lynne Truss doesn't take up cases this complicated — but many writers tend to use commas for longer proper names, omitting them for shorter ones.  Apparently the writer of the original text opted for commas, possibly because "The New Language of Politics" is pretty long.  But only the first turned up in the text as printed above.  What happened?

Two possibilities.  First, that the writer made the very common error of leaving out the second comma in matched pairs; if so, an editor should have supplied it.  Second, and I think more likely, that the writer put the second comma in, but that it was removed by an editor searching for (and destroying) "serial commas", commas preceding "and" at the end of a string of coordinated expressions.  The Voices house style seems to be thoroughly anti-serial; elsewhere in the Safire article, we find:

Serial vs. anti-serial is one of those absurd religious disputes that concern the minutest points of practice but consume astonishing amounts of the energy and time of practitioners.  (Lynne Truss, sensibly, refuses to take sides.)  I'm a serial guy myself, but I'm exposed to material punctuated according to both schemes, with the result that I doubt that I'd note inconsistent use of commas within a text, unless I was specifically examining its punctuation style.  I suspect that most people (other than copy editors and such) are like me; at any given point in our reading, we have to be prepared to cope with either scheme.  Which means, paradoxically, that all the effort invested in enforcing one scheme or the other consistently is wasted on ordinary readers; we're not going to notice inconsistency.

This point turns out to be important to the punctuation of the Voices sentence we started with.  Suppose the writer had opted for the comma-ed appositive in (2).  That would give us:

This is still likely to be read wrong, as a coordination of four, rather than three, things.  To divine the writer's intentions, you'd have to appreciate that the Voices text is consistently anti-serial.  Which means that you'd have to have noticed that the one preceding coordination (the one going from Krauthammer to Wiesel) had no serial comma.  This is way too subtle for ordinary readers.

The easy solution would be to use the comma-less appositive in (1); the anti-serial version is:

and the (to my mind better) serial version is:

As Geoff Pullum pointed out in a chat around the water cooler here at Language Log Plaza, part of the problem with (3) is that it uses commas in two different functions.  Geoff Nunberg then observed that you can use semicolons to fix this:

The semicolon can be your friend.  (Notice that that last semicolon is obligatory, whatever your position on serialism vs. anti-serialism.)  [Addendum 12/11: John Cowan tells me that there are committed anti-serialists who reduce the final serial semicolon (when it's being used as a "super-comma") to a comma.  That is, these people allow a comma after the penultimate conjunct, but only as a replacement for the even stronger punctuation mark, semicolon.]

A final surprising fact: the address that Safire gave when he accepted the Guardian of Zion Award was titled, according to Voices, "Jerusalem, Job, and Justice" — WITH A SERIAL COMMA, despite the fact that Safire is otherwise an anti-serialist: recall that the subtitle of his political dictionary is A Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans and Political Usage, and that he has written for many years for the New York Times, which is consistently anti-serial (though they don't go so far as to change book titles and subtitles that have serial commas in them).  I think his punctuation choice is a good one, even for a confirmed antiserialist; "Jerusalem, Job and Justice" invites a reading in which the comma introduces an appositive, "Jerusalem: Job and Justice". 

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 10, 2006 12:37 PM