The digital age is one of dispiriting decadence, and one aspect of world culture that has suffered immensely in this freewheeling atmosphere is language.
Take the humble comma, for example. Scribblers on social media and elsewhere are increasingly discarding this important punctuation mark like unwanted clutter.
I get it. On social media platforms and when texting their friends, some people may seek to be brief or informal, or to distinguish themselves from stiff-necked pedants who insist on obeying old language rules.
Because casual digital communication tends to be informal and leans on colloquial language, there may be the perception that formal punctuation rules are cumbersome and pedantic. For some people, speed and comprehension matter more than old grammatical conventions.
I also accept that languages are always in a state of flux and evolve over time. In digital communication, some people are bound to create their own writing styles or copy trendy ones that deliberately disregard traditional punctuation and spelling rules.
Of course it’s futile to fight these trends. But one begins to worry when these digital habits start infecting formal writing, such as official reports, legislation and serious newspaper articles. For example, newsrooms frequently get updates from the DCI written in all caps, with few pauses in between what are supposed to be sentences.
In serious writing, the comma is an essential punctuation mark. Among its many functions, it indicates pauses, separations or relationships between parts of a sentence, making it easier for readers to understand the message the writer intended.
Imagine trying to read a sentence where items on a list are not separated, or introductory phrases or clauses are not set off, or independent and dependent clauses are not distinguished.
There’s not enough space here to discuss how a misplaced comma or lack of it can lead to ambiguity, alter the meaning of a sentence, or cause a shift in interpretation, sometimes to disastrous legal consequences.
The outcome of a court case in the United States will help illustrate some of the perils we are talking about. Several milk delivery drivers in the northeastern state of Maine won a judgment of $5 million in 2018 to settle a complaint against their employer about unpaid overtime.
A judge had sided with the drivers in a ruling made a year earlier. The point of contention? The lack of an Oxford comma in a Maine labour law.
Oxford Languages, the publisher of popular dictionaries, defines the Oxford comma as one “used after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items, before ‘and’ or ‘or’ (e.g. an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect)”. While this comma is rare in most journalism, it is favoured by academics and chatbots.
The drivers’ employer had argued that Maine’s labour laws exempted them from overtime pay. Before the line was amended by the Maine legislature (which inserted a semicolon to replace ‘or’), the legal guideline exempted several tasks from overtime pay.
These included: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: Agricultural produce; Meat and fish products; and Perishable foods.”
The line “packing for shipment or distribution” lacked an Oxford comma after “shipment”. The drivers argued that the phrase referred to packing and shipping as a single act, and that because packing wasn’t part of their job, they shouldn’t have been exempted from overtime pay.
The judge agreed. “Specifically, if that [list of exemptions] used a serial comma to mark off the last of the activities that it lists, then the exemption would clearly encompass an activity that the drivers perform,” the judge wrote.
“Serial comma” is another name for the Oxford comma. There you have it – overlook this tiny but significant pause indicator at your own peril.
— The writer is a Sub-Editor with People Daily; [email protected]
