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Comma Sense
A FUNdamental Guide to Punctuation
By Richard Lederer, John Shore, James McLean St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2005 Richard Lederer and John Shore
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0644-9
CHAPTER 1
THE PERIOD
There are only three ways a sentence can end —
With an exclamation point:
You won!
With a question mark:
You won?
Or with a period:
I know you won, but I'm having trouble believing it.
That's it. Those are your choices. Every sentence that's not an exclamation or a question must end with a period. And because people are by and large too proud to ask too many questions and too shy to go around hollering all the time, the vast (not the half-vast) majority of sentences are what are called declarative statements — statements that just say something and therefore end in a period.
It is difficult to think of any other instance in life in which something as small as the period carries so much clout. It's a mark so dinky that farsighted fleas court it. Yet virtually any declarative statement — a picturesque description, a mild directive, a thoughtful observation, or a wandering exposition that starts out as if it's going somewhere specific but about halfway through makes clear enough that if it ever does pull in anywhere, it'll do so carrying the corpses of whatever readers were unlucky enough to have climbed aboard it in the first place — must stop whenever the period says it's time.
Verily is the period the crosswalk guard of our language.
If only there were any famous crosswalk guards, we could use one of them right here as a metaphor for the period. But, of course, most of us never give a thought to those stalwart sedan stoppers except when we're watching them from inside our cars, feeling weird about how much we, too, want to wear a cop's hat and a bright orange vest and hold up a big sign stopping all the cars so little kids can be on their scholarly little way.
That's why we resist making crosswalk guards famous: It ticks us off that they have better jobs than we do. Why should they get any more glory? They've got their hats, their signs, their cool sashes, their white gloves. That's enough. Any more, and they'll feel empowered enough to start shooting out our tires to stop us.
No, as a metaphor for the period the crosswalk guard won't do at all.
We need someone small. Someone powerful. Someone who at first seemed to have no potential. Someone with attitude. Someone with finishing power.
We need Seabiscuit!
He's small: Sizewise, Seabiscuit was closer to a merry-go-round horse than a stakes-hogging racehorse.
He's powerful: In a much-ballyhooed match race, Seabiscuit spotted the stately War Admiral whole hands and still whipped him.
Even equine experts didn't think that the plucky little horse had any potential: There was a time when Seabiscuit couldn't be given away. (Just as, in the beginning, no one thought the period would be able to reach the finish line, let alone stop the most puffed up of sentences. The giant, imposing question mark was supposed to be the punctuation leader — and you see how that turned out.)
He's got attitude: Seabiscuit liked to torment his fellow racehorses by always just beating them, (just as the period seems to enjoy taunting letters and words by letting them think they might have a chance of ending up ahead of it. It's wrong to behave that way, of course — but sometimes that's the kind of attitude that makes a winner a winner.)
He's got finishing power. Seabiscuit surged to the finish line first in an awesomely high percentage of his races.
And finally, just as Seabiscuit needed a strong and thoughtful rider in order to do his best (Johnny "Red" Pollard and 'Biscuit had a special bond), so the period needs a strong and thoughtful writer to do its best. And that writer is you, friend. So get that foot up in that stirrup, swing that other leg up and over, and let's show these whippersnapper words how the little boys do it.
• A period marks the conclusion of any sentence that doesn't end with an exclamation point or a question mark:
Singing with utmost exuberance and abandon and filling in the music-only parts with dance steps reminiscent of how impossible it was to even walk in disco shoes, Bert delivered a karaoke version of K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "Get Down Tonight" that was a testimony to what it was about disco in the first place that compelled so many of us to drop out of high school.
Today Einstein's brain is stored in formaldehyde in a jar, in the hopes that future scientists will be able to figure out what exactly they're supposed to do with a brain in a jar.
• In U.S. punctuation, periods always — and we do mean always — go inside quotation marks.
They do things backwards in Britain, like driving on the wrong side of the road and serving warm beer and cold toast. But the Brits' system of placing the period outside quotation marks actually makes more sense. Still, we live in the U.S. of A., so we'll say it again:
• In U.S. punctuation, periods always — and we do mean always — go inside quotation marks:
"What I remember," said Carl as he lay upon his psychotherapist's couch being suddenly filled with early childhood memories, "is sitting in the middle of the floor of our old family room, wearing those white, plastic, over-the-diaper parity things. It was mortifying to have to sit around all day, looking like the fuse on a whipped cream bomb."
• Periods belong inside parentheses that enclose a free-standing sentence and outside parentheses that enclose material that is not a full statement:
The new album by the band Bob's Pock Mark is absolutely superb (bearing in mind, of course, that none of the band's members can sing or play any instruments). The guys in the band say that they're proud of songs such as "Love Backwards Is Evolve, Almost" and "Feed Me" because they're socially galvanizing, radically artistic messages. (They can be also be played on a haircomb.)
• Periods are also used with numbers, abbreviations, and initials:
1. Mr. E. Z. Rider
2. Ms. Q.T. Pie
3. Dr. M.T. Handed
4. Prof. I.V. Leaguer, Ph.D.
There. That's it. You're done. You now know everything there is to know about the period. Period. End of sentence.
CHAPTER 2
THE QUESTION MARK
There's no question but that asking questions throughout human history is how we, as a race, have made it to where we are today. There's virtually nothing in our lives that we now take for granted that didn't begin with someone somewhere asking a critical question. What would life be like today if no one had ever dared to ask such questions as:
"Why don't we try pointed sticks?"
"Wouldn't wearing something along the lines of what the animals wear be better than coating ourselves with mud every morning?"
"Couldn't we come up with better protection from the elements than just holding boulders over our heads wherever we go?"
"That thing that dropped out of that chicken just now — is edible?"
"Would the wheel work better if we made it into a shape other than square?"
"Hey, has anyone else noticed that there's only one horrible despot, and about a million of us?"
So there it is: Without the power of the question, it's clear that today we'd all be running around covered in mud, ruled by an evil despot, and struggling to hold boulders over our heads while poking our enemies and our potential meals with a blunt stick. And we'd never have been able to ride in an SUV.
From the dawn of civilization humans have certainly benefited from inquiring minds that wanted to know. But no one has asked more life-altering questions than the great Albert Einstein, destined to be forever revered as the intuitive genius who gazed deep and hard into the dark stillness of the celestial abode and dared to ask: "What is the deal with my hair? Why do I always look as if I'd just been struck by lightning? When — oh when? — is someone going to invent conditioner?"
We jest, of course. As anyone who has ever seen a picture of him knows, Einstein couldn't have cared less about his hair. He knew it protected his head — and that was good enough for him. Because inside that head were percolating answers to the kinds of questions that only Einstein could ask — and that only he could answer.
Before Einstein published his monumental, paradigm-smashing Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, we believed that time and space were fixed, firmly and eternally rooted in mathematical truths established two centuries earlier by another physics genius with dramatic hair, Sir Isaac Newton. (Newton's wiggy hair protected him against a bushel of apples that, from time to time, was known to bounce off his skull.)
Before Einstein, time and space were absolutes. After Einstein, they became, well, relative. (And the picnic was pretty much over for matter, energy, and gravity, too.)
Ultimately, Einstein was able to boil down his discovery about the true relationship between energy and mass (namely, that they're different forms of the same thing) to his famous equation, e = mc2 — which is, without a doubt, the most succinct expression of anything in any language ever. As just about everyone knows, in this equation, e stands for energy, m represents mass, and c2 is the square of the speed of light.
In other words, to find out how much energy would be in a thing if it were suddenly transformed into pure energy, all you have to do is multiply its weight by the square of the speed of light.
Isn't it funny how something can become so obvious once someone else points it out? It's like looking at a paper clip: Of course it would work! Of course e = mc2! Of course if the speed of light is constant, then time and distance must be relative!
Duh.
Doesn't it drive you crazy that you didn't see it first? Us, too. But, whaddaya gonna do? Now Einstein's famous, and all that's left for us to do is try to figure out how the legacy of his genius is supposed to provide us with the answers to math test questions such as:
Two men are sitting in window seats in two different trains hurtling in opposite directions. One man is wearing a watch; the other is wearing a hat. When train A leaves the station, the time is exactly twelve noon. When train B leaves its station, the time is twelve midnight. The man aboard train A knows what time it is, because he is the man with the watch. The man aboard train B isn't sure of the exact time, but he knows it's somewhere near midnight, because when dining on bratwurst about an hour before, he asked a woman what time it was, and she said eleven.
At the moment the two trains pass one another, train A is going 100 miles per hour, and train B is traveling at twice the speed of light. Now imagine that both trains freeze at the very moment the two windows at which the men are sitting are directly across from each another. When the man with the watch looks over at the man with the hat, which of the following will he see?:
• (a) A child in a hat much too large for him;
• (b) A man pasted against the back of his chair wearing that bug- eyed, teeth-bared, Quasimodo-nostriled, flappy-cheeked expression people get when they go superfast;
• (c) An empty train seat;
• (d) Waldo.
See? Einstein's theories are simple — but applying them is a can of wormholes. Well, no matter. Because ultimately it's less important to be able to answer a question than it is to ask one in the first place. And when you write a question, there's only one rule about the question mark you need to bear in mind:
? Put one at the end of a question:
Was Einstein such a science maverick because his own last name violates the "i'-before-e-except-after-c" rule twice?
Einstein's hair looked like that because he asked himself, "What would happen if I stuck my finger into a wall socket?"
Did Einstein really say, "My hair is definitely better this way"? [Note that in the "wall socket" example, Einstein's words are actually the question — so the question mark goes inside the quotation marks. In the example after that, the sentence itself is a question, not Einstein's quotation, so the question mark goes outside the quotation marks.]
Did you know that Albert Einstein played linebacker for the Princeton University football team?
Place a question mark at the end of a question. Now that's easy. There's no reason at all why that simple formula — unlike Einstein's simple formula — should ever become a matter of gravity.
CHAPTER 3
THE EXCLAMATION POINT
The exclamation point is perfectly named: You can just tell what it does. The names of the other marks reveal nothing about their purpose: Ellipsis sounds like a medical term for a muscular dysfunction of the lips. One might guess parentheses to be some sort of hypothetical proposal presented by a mom or dad ("A Parent's Thesis on the Matrix of Dynamics Supporting the Validity of the Imperative 'Because I Said So'"). Comma is dangerously close to coma. Apostrophe ("a pa's trophy") sounds like a father's reward for winning a golf tournament. Hyphens sound dauntingly as though you need to scale a "high fence" to master them.
And what else can the word semicolon refer to but a truck parked on someone's rear end? Either that, or someone with only ... well, never mind.
But exclamation point! It removes all mystery! This one has a point to make. And — true to its very nature — it's not wasting any time making it. Once we know the name of this mark, we have a very strong sense of its function. Use the exclamation point to emphasize an emotion or put backbone into a command.
But that's not really enough for us, is it? We wouldn't want to be known or understood solely on the basis of how we function, would we? We don't want to be defined by what we do; we all want to be defined by who we are.
So who, really, is this inciter of excitement, this titan of tingle, this prince of palpitation? If we delved inside this flashiest of points, whom, exactly, would we find there?
In order to discover the inner exclamation point, we must, of course, deeply and truly identify with it. Like actors trying to grasp the essence of a character they mean to play, we must become the exclamation point if we are really going to know it at all.
So here's what you do: Go stand in front of a mirror. Look into the other side of the glass and try to evince in your expression the intent, purpose, and entire being of the exclamation point. Feel its surprise; its natural ebullience; its spontaneous emotional urgency. Become one with the exclamation point.
Go ahead. Make the face of the exclamation point.
Now quick: Whom do you look like?
That's right: Lucy Ricardo.
And there you have it: Lucy is the exclamation point!
Okay, stop making that face now. You might strain something.
All you need do is delve into the inner core of the exclamation point, and the person you'll find there is none other than film comedienne and television megastar Lucille Ball, also known as Lucy Ricardo — her bright red hair, her dress with the huge polka dots, her irrepressible, over-the-top energy.
Bearing Lucy in mind — and, for that matter, the whole cast of the I Love Lucy show — let's take a look at the variety of emotions whose expressions can be enhanced through the use of the exclamation point:
Anger:
Liiuuucy! You got some 'splainin' to do!
Stop complaining, Ethel! You ought to be grateful that when you married me, you acquired the name Mertz!
Oh, Fred, stop being so cheap — and stop wearing your pants up around your neck!
Surprise:
Ricky's gonna let me sing at the club!
What! You're having another baby! But we sleep in separate beds! Now you really got some 'splainin' to do!
Lucy, Danny Thomas is in your kitchen! Again!
Love:
I love you, Ricky!
I love you, Lucy!
I love you, Ethel!
I love Lucy, Fred!
Pride:
I run the best nightclub in the city!
I've got the reddest hair in this building!
I married a woman much younger than I!
I still haven't murdered Fred in his sleep!
Desperation:
They're closing my nightclub!
Howdy Doody moved into 3-G! Now I don't have the reddest hair in the building!
Even though Ethel's pretty young, she dresses like a frumpy grandmother!
I still haven't murdered Fred in his sleep!
Joy:
It's a boy! We're gonna give him an inferiority complex for life by calling him Little Ricky!
Oh, Fred! Ricky bought Lucy a new car, a new washing machine, and all new bedroom furniture!
Oh, Ethel! We're about to get an old car, an old washing machine, and some old bedroom furniture!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Comma Sense by Richard Lederer, John Shore, James McLean. Copyright © 2005 Richard Lederer and John Shore. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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