So That's What She Does with the Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Thanks to assorted SPOGGers who sent this along, we now know that Rachael Ray is a cannibal. A cannibal who not only gets nutrition from cooking her family and her dog, but also inspiration.

We think we're going to barf right about ... now.

(And yes, this demonstrates why commas are sometimes very necessary. But next time we're hungry, we'll be sure to consult her recipe for cooking family members. Some of our nieces and nephews look delicious.)

Update: Tails magazine says the cover was Photoshopped. It's still funny, though.

Would You Use a Serial Comma?

If we were writing these instructions, we would write "Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant, or both." This is because we have, of late, become fans of the serial comma.

Long ago, when we worked for a newspaper (remember those?), we were told never to use a comma before the third element in a simple sequence. As we argue in our book, however, it can make writing a bit more clear if it's consistently included.

Anyhoo, we're really only posting this here and going on at length because it's April 1. This has to be a joke, right?



Thanks to Lance for the submission.

Friday Sign of the Apocalypse

Smoking pets wearing shoes, though, are entirely welcome.

Thanks to Denis in Vermont for the picture.

Martha Stewart: Maybe Not So Popular?

This comes from her blog:

My good friends, Michael and Judy Steinhardt, have an amazing
piece of property near my home in Bedford, and they are so fortunate to have
such a grove.

SPOGG worries that Martha is short on good friends. Otherwise, why would she wrap the Steinharts in commas? That punctuational flourish limits her "good friends" category to the Steinhardts. While we're sure they're lovely people, surely Martha would count Snoop Doggy Dogg among her besties? After all, he was just on her show--fo shizzle!

Here's how it works:

If there's just one of something, use a comma, --The Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling,...
If there's more than one, don't--Magazine moguls who spend time in the slammer...

Punctuation. It's a good thing.

Democracy in the Nude!

Michael V. sends this sentence our way:

The State Board of Elections decided today to adopt a ban on clothing, including buttons and hats that directly endorse a candidate or issue. (See more...)

So it seems unlikely that the elections board is banning clothing. This highlights the difference an extra comma and word can make.

The state board of elections has decided today to adopt a ban on clothing, buttons and hats that directly endorse a candidate or issue. [EDITED FROM EARLIER VERSION WHEN SPOGG WAS TOO TIRED TO THINK CLEARLY.]

Vote early! Vote often! Vote ... in the nude!

Sarah Palin T-Shirt Scandal

We haven't had time to study this with our Jr. FBI Forensic Foto KitTM, but we are fairly certain this T-shirt says "I may be broke but, I am not flat busted."

SPOGG is outraged. The comma should come BEFORE the but, not after. This is every bit as bad as Paris Hilton's "THATS HOT" T-shirt.

We're definitely going to protest if the McCain campaign comes to our city. We will hold a big sign with a comma on it, and the warning: BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PUT THAT THING. We only hope no one thinks the comma is, well, a sperm. We understand the Palin people are a little testy about that topic these days.

Punctuation, It Has an Accent?

Dana D. sent this in, noting the extra comma after "evolved." Is it possible this is, how you say, Russian cat?

Commas and Polygamy

Commas can keep you out of all sorts of trouble:

"American Idol" season 4 runner-up Bo Bice and his wife Caroline Fisher welcomed a baby boy on Tuesday, Aug. 5, reports Usmagazine.com.

"Caroline Fisher" should be set off with commas here. Unless, of course, he has more than one wife, in which case she will be set off by having to share.

If here is only one of something you're identifying with further information--"my wife, Caroline,"--you need to set it off with commas. It's a non-restrictive modifier. In regular English, that means it's something that doesn't limit the meaning of the sentence because it's by definition limited. He only has one wife. Right?

If there's more than one of something--"the American Idol runner up Bo Bice"--you can't use commas to separate Bo from his antecedent. You're limiting the meaning.

There have been many American Idol runners up. Bo Bice isn't even the most famous American Idol runner up to be expecting a child right around now. In fact, we were hoping this was about the birth of the child fathered by American Idol runner up Clay Aiken, who conceived via artificial insemination (a fact we include only to demonstrate this whole comma thing one last time).

Commady from the Onion

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere

Click the link above to learn, more, about the plague of commas, appearing in, our sentences.

When Does SPOGG Love Bad Punctuation?

SPOGG loves bad punctuation when it comes with really good salsa.

For years, we've noticed the writing on this garbage can at our favorite neighborhood taco joint. It's a festival—nay, a fiesta— errors.

And yet, the salsa at this place is so delicious, we completely overlook the punctuation. We count two unnecessary apostrophes, two superfluous sets of quotation marks, and one completely baffling comma. That's a lot of errors in a seven-word message.

Two years ago we moved out of the neighborhood with this wonderful little restaurant. So when we were back in the area on Saturday, we had to snap a picture, just for nostalgia's sake. When we can't have the salsa, we can look at the picture, which makes us almost as happy.

Down with Serial-Comma Killers?

Jeff "the Punctuation Man" Rubin announced today that he endorses the serial comma:

Punctuation Man, a leading authority on punctuation and teaching punctuation to elementary school children, today announced his decision to fully support the use of the serial comma.

Shunned by the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, the serial comma is still widely accepted by educators, grammarians, and literary circles, including Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and the Chicago Manual of Style. The announcement coincides with the National Education Association's (NEA) "Read Across America" child literacy program, to be held nationwide on Monday, March 3.

There is no small debate about the serial comma (also known as the Oxford Comma). It is a comma used before a coordinating conjunction (such as "and") before the last item in a series of three or more. For example: The flag is red, white, and blue.

Enter Jeff Rubin -- aka Punctuation Man -- a former newspaper reporter turned newsletter publisher, public speaker, and founder of National Punctuation Day, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary on September 24. Jeff and his wife, Norma, travel the nation to teach children the basics of punctuation with Punctuation Playtime, a live assembly program that is also offered to teachers, schools, and school districts as an instructional DVD.

Pity the Extinct Buckle

Sue sends this along:

Tuesday, 19 February 2008, BBC News
Pierced skull and bones recovered
More bones, including those from a juvenile and a 14th century metal buckle were also recovered during the work.

For those of you who don't know, the buckle is extinct, hunted to death by Velcros and zippers. One can occasionally find the preserved bones of 14th century metal buckles. Contrary to what one reads on the Internets, these bones can't be ground into a penis-enlarging powder.

Commady!

We found this headline in today's Seattle P-I:

Shoot. There goes our trade-in honey

Honey. It's delicious, but it's still not worth its weight in gold.

So step away from the pantry. Instead, reach into the couch cushions and pull out a comma. One has no doubt wedged itself there, along with loose change and your spare keys. Then insert the comma thus: "Shoot. There goes our trade-in, honey."

That Would Be a Smart Bomb

We found this today on Slate, in a story summarizing what's being said in the blogosphere:

They also reflect on President Bush's decision to offer "smart" bombs to Saudi Arabia and congratulate the children's book authors who won the 2008 Caldecott and Newbery Awards.

So, when these bombs explode, does everyone sit down and read? That would be nice, especially if the book bombs were immediately followed by grape-juice and carpet-square bombs.

But we don't think that's what the writer meant. A comma would have made this sentence much clearer.

They also reflect on President Bush's decision to offer "smart" bombs to Saudi Arabia, and they congratulate the children's book authors who won the 2008 Caldecott and Newbery Awards.

Here's the Beef

Newspaper reporters are taught to shun the serial comma. So, in a sequence of three things--apples, oranges and pears--the newspaper reporter would NOT put a comma in front of the and (even though someone writing a book would).

This is the only explanation we can give for this sentence, which is positively screaming for a comma (and maybe the sort of surgery that separates conjoined twins):

The matter is not simply that his writers were on the picket line on a primary eve that saw both a formerly fat former governor of Arkansas introduce a sandwich called the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel, the presently zany former governor of Alaska, advise an audience at Phillips Exeter Academy to smoke marijuana, as if boarding-school students needed such encouragement.

The sandwich is called "the Huckaburger." It's not "the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel," even though that's how anyone not from a town called Hope would read it. When a sentence sprouts a complete second half, you need to insert a comma before the conjunction.

Sometimes, when you have two complete sentences joined by a conjunction, you can drop the conjunction and insert a semicolon, but not in this particular example, or on Slate in general because its former editor, Michael Kinsley, hates semicolons. That's awfully rich for a guy who was still wearing handsome little gold-rimmed spectacles in the 1990s.

The Angry Grammarian

He blogs here about the Second Amendment. The upshot? Even grammar nerds remain confused, though likely to cling to the clarifying (sort of) powers of the comma:

Eats, Shoots and Dies

Last week the Supreme Court decided to hear a Second Amendment case on the D.C. handgun ban, and it sent opponents scurrying for the battle lines. On one side, Charlton Heston, Ted Nugent and the militiamen of Pennsyltucky. On the other, grammarians.

This particular case, say the grammarians, reignites an age-old debate about how many commas are actually in the Second Amendment. The number of commas has the potential to dramatically change the meaning.

The handwritten copy at the National Archives reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

But lots of folks—including the official U.S. Government Printing Office—omit the first and third commas: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

As University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron wrote in the LA Times earlier this year, “The first comma in the Second Amendment signals a pause. At first glance, it looks like it’s setting off a phrase in apposition, but by the time you get to the second comma, even if you don’t know what a phrase in apposition is, you realize that it doesn’t do that.”

Instead, Baron says, “That second comma identifies what grammarians call an absolute clause, which modifies the entire subsequent clause.” Which basically means that the framers intended the Second Amendment to be about not guns, but militias.
Typically, the fewer commas the better, but with an argument this sound, we’ll hold onto commas like our lives depend on it.

When does a hyphen follow the word “well”? I’m always confused by this.

Don’t tell the militia, but the framers actually got this one wrong.

“Well” needs a hyphen whenever it’s part of a compound modifier (i.e., two words combining to modify the same noun): well-dressed man, well-known woman, well-written amendment. The only times compound modifiers don’t get a hyphen are after “very” and after any adverb ending in “-ly.” And when older interpretations are needed to talk down psycho right-wing gun nuts.

Read more...

Commady!

This headline appeared on MSN.com today:

Bar patron awakens minus pants, containing $41,000

We get that he lost his pants. What we're wondering, though, was how someone stuffed him with $41,000. Even if they used large bills, that sort of thing sounds painful.

We're Commatose

Defamer.com. It's good for Hollywood gossip, bad for punctuation. Behold this sentence:

Remember, Lisa Marie Nowak, adult-undergarment-wearing, crazy-in-love
astronaut?

Unless they're talking to Ms. Nowak, that comma after "remember" is unnecessary. An article before adult-undergarment-wearing would be nice, too. Like this:

Remember Lisa Marie Nowak, the adult-undergarment-wearing,
crazy-in-love astronaut?

The blog entry...

What Happens in Las Vegas

We read this sentence with interest:

According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

We've never been to Las Vegas, but had no idea the beds and tomatoes in Las Vegas could strike such fear into the heart of a parent. Now, Mr. Turd Blossom could have meant he didn't want his son to pick tomatoes, or make beds in Las Vegas. That comma changes the meaning of the sentence, if not the sentiment of its author.

But it still makes us wonder about the beds in Las Vegas. What could possibly be happening in them that would traumatize a 17-year-old forced to make them? We'll never know, because what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Alas.

At any rate, we'd be happy to talk about the job we had when we were 17. We cut straps in a golf-bag manufacturing company. Every day, we came home with a sore back, burned hands, and the scent of hot rubber in our hair.

The job paid $4 per hour, but was worth much more for the lessons in humility it taught, along with respect for the would-be American immigrants we worked with. All 17-year-olds should be so lucky.

So Picky, But...

Here is a misplaced comma in David Brooks's New York Times column:

As the trucker spoke, I was reminded of a book that came out a few years ago called “The Dignity of Working Men,” by the sociologist, Michèle Lamont, who is now at Harvard. Lamont interviewed working-class men, and described what she calls “the moral centrality of work.”

When comma is in front of her name, it makes her identity a non-essential clause. This is not the case. Even if Harvard has hired only one sociologist lately, her name is necessary information in a sentence written this way.

The comma after her name, meanwhile, is correct. "Who is now at Harvard" is a phrase modifying Lamont.

Perhaps we are extra-persnickety today, but shouldn't a columnist at the world's most prestigious newspaper -- and his copy editor -- get this sort of thing right?