Yesterday on Facebook, Michael Israel re-posted an item from The Oxford Comma site (showing the cover of an old issue of Tails pet magazine), with the (in this context) foolish advice “Use the Oxford comma, folks”:
Relevant terminology. From NOAD:
compound noun Oxford comma: a comma 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 [with the Oxford comma boldfaced]).
noun asyndeton: the omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence [from which we get the adjective asyndetic, as in asyndetic coordination ‘coordination lacking conjunctions’ (e.g. an Italian painter, sculptor, architect]
My response to The Oxford Comma folks. (As usual, some edited somewhat edited here.)
— The issue here has absolutely nothing to do with the Oxford comma (I am in fact an Oxford commatic, but that use of the comma is irrelevant here); instead, what’s at issue is a convention of signage that all punctuation marks should be suppressed — including not only apostrophes, but also commas (with serial commas conveyed by line breaks); in this reproduction, above, of signage form, the serial comma after cooking (the first of three conjoined noun phrases in series) has been suppressed, but is conveyed instead by the line break. A comma after the the second conjunct, her family, is also suppressed; this is the Oxford comma, which is omissible in certain styles so long as the conjunction and is overt, but is obligatory in asyndetic coordination — so, in running print:
finds inspiration in cooking, her family, her dog
but in signage format:
finds inspiration
in cooking
her family
her dog
Consider this road sign on an exit from El Camino Real to University Avenue a few blocks from my house: a right-pointing arrow with the sign:
Downtown
Freeway
This is not a direction to a thoroughfare called the Downtown Freeway, but instead conveys that this is the exit that goes to downtown (Palo Alto) and to the closest freeway (the Bayshore Freeway, a section of US 101 running alongside the San Francisco Bay). That is, it conveys downtown, freeway.
Eat, Ray, Love. Also on the cover. A playful variant of the book title Eat, Pray, Love (with asyndetic coordination). From Wikipedia:
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert.
The playful variant is to be understood as an imperative addressed to (professional cook, tv personality, and food writer) Rachel Ray. As, roughly, ‘(Rachel) Ray — eat, love!’ (with the address term Ray set off by commas signalling a separate phonological phrase). From Wikipedia:
Eat Pray Love is a 2010 American biographical romantic drama film starring Julia Roberts as Elizabeth Gilbert, based on Gilbert’s 2006 memoir of the same name.
Both the book title (with commas) and the movie title (with even the commas suppressed) are just chainings of elements, mere juxtaposition conveying (in this case) coordination, in which it’s not clear that these are imperatives (they could just be lists of references to three activities) or that temporal sequence is implicated.
The title of this posting. Comma, comma, comma chameleon — titling a posting about the uses of commas — is a play on the chorus of the song “Karma Chameleon”. From Wikipedia:
“Karma Chameleon” is a song by English band Culture Club, featured on the group’s 1983 album Colour by Numbers.
with a chorus beginning:
karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon
which illustrates yet another use of commas (there are many): in pure repetition, for emphasis or in chants (not in any kind of syntactic coordination, so without any conjunctions). Punctuation with commas signals a prosody in which each repetend is produced as a separate phonological phrase, with terminal falling intonation. Punctuation without commas —
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon
signals a prosody in which the whole business is treated as one phonological phrase.
Leave a Reply