Commas of Mass Destruction: Part 1

In New York in the 1930s, two men had a massive fight about commas.

Their names were Harold Ross and James Thurber. Harold Ross was the editor and head of the New Yorker Magazine, and James Thurber was a humourist who worked for the magazine.

Ross loved commas. He pretty much wanted to marry a comma. But Thurber thought they were a bit more unnecessary. For example, if Thurber wrote ‘red white and blue’, Ross would change it to ‘red, white, and blue’. They could only see one way to settle their differences: with a punch-on.

So who was right? Well, to work that out, first we need to work out exactly what a comma is for.

The word ‘comma’ means ‘cut off piece’, and was first applied to writing back in ancient Greece, to tell actors reading aloud when to pause and take a breath when they were saying their lines. And this was what it was used for for a long time. (During the middle ages, it even had a little comrade punctuation mark called a ‘virgula suspensiva’, which looked a bit like a forward slash [/] which was used for the briefest of pauses, but that has now died out.)

Slowly, the comma began to be used for more than just reading out loud.

Now, the function of the comma is:

1. To divide things in lists

We bought oranges, apples and pears

In lists, the comma is not required before the and on the end, unless you believe in the oxford comma, which we’ll be confronting in part two of commas.


2. To join things in a sentence

When two sentences join to be one, a comma is like the contraception they use to ensure the information they contain stays separate

The sentence: The night was ice cold. There was frost everywhere.

could become: The night was ice cold, there was frost everywhere.

3. To fill gaps of information

For example, instead of saying

My old dog has three legs; my new dog has four legs.

You could say

My old dog has three legs; my new dog, four.


4. To show that someone is about to talk

Such as:

Suddenly he stood up and said, ‘Right then. Where are my slippers?’

5. After an exclamation or interjection:

Holy shit, what am I going to do now?


Jesus, I hate this song


OMG, where did all these lame playsuits come from?

6. To ‘bracket’ extra information.

This is a bit of a tricky one. The rule of bracketing is that you use them to put a ‘weak interruption’, in a sentence. A weak interruption is an additional piece of information. This doesn’t mean that the information isn’t important, it just means that it is ‘added’.

Her dark hair, scented like almonds, was like silk to the touch.

We ate all the ice creams, even the tofu-flavoured ones, that we could find in the fridge.

The girl, Josie, finally spoke.

In these cases, the added information could be left out, but it means that the sentence would probably be a bit less interesting and would offer less information about what’s going on.

7. To breathe.

This is the oldest, and most important function of the comma. It gives you an idea of the rhythm of what is happening and the way people are talking. When you talk, you don’t talk at the same pace, with the same pitch, the whole time. Without even thinking about it, you use pauses.

So when you’re writing stuff down, you should think about when you would pause. As you might have noticed, MC Grammar uses a lot of commas – maybe even more than is average – because MC Grammar always talks in an even, calm, emphatic and commanding manner. Each time you see a comma when you read this blog, that’s my way of letting you know that I am inhaling another strong, determined breath, and setting my steel gaze upon you, so that my eyes seem like two polished tiger-eye stones as I make yet another point about grammar. But do I apologise for this love of commas? Of course I don’t. This is because I know that each comma is well-placed and thought out.

But beware, readers, the comma has the potential for setting off a war of catastrophic proportions, in its mutant form, the Oxford Comma.

/Stay tuned for part two of Commas of Mass Destruction.