Love, Those, Commas

The comma is man’s best friend. It’s a dot with a cute little tail, poised in mid-air, wagging just for you. The comma is a tilted ice cream cone and a young minnow and one of them old timey bone horns you blow into, like the Jewish shofar. (Your sentence could substitute a flugelhorn but it’ll lack pagentry.) Commas also signify when to take a wee breath, a little pause, a rest. And, commas help form sentence grammar.

My beef is that last bit, sentence grammar. There aren’t enough commas in U.S. sentence grammar these days. Technically I have no business being irritated: my grammar is founded on speling errors and trendy word combos like “gassing the Mason jar” and “feline fart farm.” Plus I have not eaten beef since 1986.

Okay, I’ve never used those word combos and just wanted you to click my links there, but “feline fart farm” is awesome and I will definitely add it to my vocabulary and maybe even trademark it. (Small & Big: A Feline Fart Farm.™)

Anywho, that issue with commas. Let me show an example. Read this:

Careful to be extra quiet so as not to disturb the other Library patrons, I was moseying amongst the magazines when my shoe stepped on a thick, slick People. In slow motion I watched my left foot slide lefter, my legs doing the splits, the Chinese splits not the American splits, and the process knocked the wind out of me. Unfortunately the wind exited via my Southern pipe, not the Northern, and was accompanied by a series of vigorous Booms! and Rat-a-tats! After about six years the explosions subsided and I shouted “It’s People! It’s just People! Continue to move about your business. People.” I don’t know why any of this happened, especially the yelling part. Life is mysterious.

Wait, that doesn’t work. I don’t know where that came from. Here’s what I meant to type, these two examples:

1) Mary had a little lamb, a little duck and a little chicken for lunch.

2) Mary had a little lamb, a little duck, and a little chicken for lunch.

The first example is how I notice lots of professional American English writers using commas. But I prefer the second. To me the second is clearer: the duck and chicken are merely number two and number three on a list. The missing comma in the first example implies that the duck and chicken are together — duck and chicken — and that presumes a relationship, leading to questions like: are they married, dating, just friends, or exes with a long history of relationship troubles? (Good thing Mary put them out of their misery.)

There are better examples out there, like in the book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!” I leave you with this: picture a comma as a wiggly-waggly tail or tilty ice cream. Use lots of them and my world is a happier place.