Author: kenthdixon

Back in (k) Possessives, there was a pretty thorough discussion of case.

Here’s yet more discussion, with the case mistakes below, in purple:

In English we know how a word is to be used in a sentence–as a noun or an article or a verb or so on–in part by where it shows up in the sentence:
He me hard hit… just isn’t English syntax.
We know by training that me comes after a verb, that he will precede the verb.

And, we have other ways of telling how a word is to be used, like adverbs–we know most adverbs end in -ly. We know a verb ending in s, like puts or misses or hits or knows, is in the third person–he or she or it or one, or any noun in the subject form: John, couch.
He knows she puts; it hits or misses. John puts, couch knows.

Which is to say, that sometimes the placement of the word tells us how it’s used, and sometimes the form of the word will be the tip-off, and sometimes both.
Case just applies to nouns and pronouns, and is a form, a variant spelling, that indicates how the noun or pronoun is used.
Nouns are easy: they change only in one way (in English, nowadays): they change their actual form (their spelling) to show what? _______________
Possessive (ownership)
Case
The heroine of the novel ==> the novel’s heroine
(ownership) the captain’s daughter
love’s sweet pain
the women’s team
Those are all nouns in the possessive case.

Pronouns are twice as hard as nouns: they change in two ways, both to show possession and also to show they’ve been acted upon–objects of something.
Pronouns have a possessive form, and an objective form, as well
as their subject form.
Subject form of noun: devil Subject form of pronoun: he
Possessive form of noun: devil’s Possessive form of pronoun: his
Object form of noun: devil Objective form of pronoun: him

So you can’t properly say he gave it to Jennifer and I,
because both Jennifer and I are objects of to. He gave we both a headache
sounds atrocious, doesn’t it? He gave us both a headache.
To say Jennifer and I, after to, sounds just as bad as he gave we, to a literate ear. It looks ignornant to a literate eye.
He gave it to I? He hit I? Me love she?
And yet you will see and hear: He gave it to Jen and I.
They hit my parents and I.
Me and her love Barb and she.

Prounoun Cases
Prounouns in the subjective case: I, you, he, she, it, we, they
Pronouns in the objective case: me, him, her, us (you doesn’t change)
Prounouns in the possessive case: my/mine, your/yours, his, hers, its, our/ours, and their/theirs. Those underlined ones are just a form of the pronoun in the possessive case that can stand alone–doesn’t have to stand next to a noun. It’s my post-it. It’s mine. Is this one yours? No, it’s ours.

Noun Cases
And we do remember how to make nouns possessive, right? K-Possessive

Just add an apostrophe and an s ! Is this one yours? No, it’s Harold’s.
This is so even if the noun already ends in s, like Dickens or Bliss or pus.
the pus’s odor, Dickens’s young wife
This can’t be counted wrong. If you want to get fancy, you can skip the
final s, and you generally skip it in the plural:
the birds’ migration …but, the children’s bird

Nasty Pronouns
There are a couple more, very vague fellows, usually called indefinite pronouns: anybody everybody nobody somebody
These change only in the possessive, and obviously would work like
nouns: anybody’s everybody’s nobody’s somebody’s baby
Which leaves us with one: one’s cup is full He caught one on the chin.

“Oh, yes, I’m the great green Teddy Bear,
pretending that you are around…
~Edyth Shuey, circa 1955
Unless you read a lot, novels and magazines and newspapers, maybe even some poetry…as far back as early high school, even earlier if you’re especially verbal, unless you did that, then the language you write with today in college comes to you through your ear as much as through your eye. Think about it: all that TV, all those friends, all that chatter . . . You’re oral, as much as literate (writing).
“Oh, yes, I’m the great green Teddy Bear. . .
is what we used to coax Edyth to sing, to the tune of the Platters’ The Great Pretender: ‘Oh-oh, yes, I’m the grea-eat pretender, pretending that you are around…
She sang it beautifully, did a black falsetto as well as any white girl could, and
we would all crack up and hide the fact that we were messing with her. She got a lot of praise from us, a lot of requests for Platters songs. We spray painted a teddy bear green for her. No one told her for four years. (Today’s hell-raisers had nothing on us!)
Now it’s your turn: share with us one of those things you got wrong as a kid, and if you were young enough, you couldn’t even hear people’s corrections. Send it to me here; I’ll put it in: dix@wittenberg.edu

The guy that draws the art on these pages? He used to say Pocchino, for the puppet with the nose. His brother called the little acquatic icthyic life forms in the fish tank… ‘Wook at the wittle siffies,’ he’d say.
“Fishies, Chris. The little fishies.
“Siffies!” he’d nod, impatient. We let it drop.
He’s got it right today.

The Point?
Once you groove in a mispronunciation, it takes work to iron out that groove. You probably have to get it right at least as many times as you did it wrong heretofore, for the correct pronunciation to come up first, naturally.
If you say, I am prejudice (for I am prejudiced, or even I am not prejudiced), and he suppose that he would go (for he supposed that he’d go),
then you have to retrain your ear to pick up that d on the end of it; so you don’t misspell it when you go to written code.
Some of these very soft endings are actually dropping out, because so many of us don’t hear them: ice cream, once upon a time, was iced cream.
Iced tea still has the d, but you’ll see it misspelled in menus as often as not.
(How do you spell Ice-T? Probably not with a d, right?)
So really the only way to correct this in yourself is first, to become aware of it. . .
prejudiced supposed iced tea (I’ll add them as I think of them, plus the send-ins)
. . . and then notice it in print, and of course, get it right when it comes to your turn.
Just add these guys to your own list of spelling demons:
becoming beginning leisure neither independent separate and so on…
You have to see it right, now, more often than you hear it the way you’re use to hearing it. /// Did you catch that one? the way you’re
used to hearing it.
We don’t hear the d because it assimilates to the t in to: usedto

Howsomever,
if you are writing the word udderly for being utterly flabbergasted,
or–what was that one I saw on an exam I was grading this morning…
supaflewus ! Or it’s a doggie dog world or various asundry
or the like, all I can tell you is you’ve got more repair work to do than even the suppose and prejudice crowd.
[ superfluous it’s a dog-eat-dog world various and sundry ]
But you know, that 4 in A Grammar 4 Dumbies, stands for the 4 years you will have had at college here. For what it’s worth (shame, jobs, love lost, lower income, diminished social status, and possibly internal organic complications), why not learn it now? Why wait till you’re dead? In heaven, they don’t cotton to incomplete or faulty PSGs (Phrase Structure Grammars).
And you know, why should they? Everything’s perfect. They probably still say iced cream, on a warm day in heaven.

The surest way to fuzzy thinking. [ ]
How best to baffle a reader. [ ]
When you really want to be unclear. [ ]
What’s an antecedant, anyway? [ ]
I like to have my reader working in reverse! [ ]

These two guys, this & which, are often used as
relative pronouns. They’re in the family with who:
who is for persons, which is for things, so is that . . .
. . . you remember that? This can get in there, too, as can it, though these are not relative pronouns but something called
expletives. Forget that. Think of this as being problematic
right along side which, when used too loosely.

Bob disliked Amy, who was his sister’s nemesis. This puzzled us.
A nemesis, usually used in the plural nemeses, is a word that we’ve taken from Green mythology: Nemesis, the goddess of getting even, revenge.
Mythology, which is a subject I deeply love, is not a great collection in the sky of untruths. That’s a limited notion, one that will blind us to the importance of myths, the very stories we live by.
So those three underlined usages are relative pronouns: who, that, which
and the purple This is an expletive like It, used here to refer back to…to what? To the fact that Bob disliked Amy, or to the fact that Amy was Bob’s sister’s come-upppance? You can’t tell and therein lies the problem.
But hold on This, and let’s (let + us => let ‘ s ) look at the pronouns:

They are called “relative” because they relate back to an antecedent.
An “antecedent” means comes before, and whatever it is that comes before will be either a noun or a pronoun:
Amy — who word — that mythology — which one — that
[Proper noun] [common noun] [another noun] [pronoun]

This is why people will pack your mind with cotton, when they use a relative pronoun to refer back not to a noun or a pronoun, but to something much more complicated, which is why it becomes vague, unclear, which is not what you want. This would be bad writing.
You can see what happens. If you use the relative pronoun to refer back to a whole idea, instead of to a clear antecedent expressed as a noun or pronoun, then you don’t know what part of the idea you’re refering to and the whole thing becomes vague, blurry. You can feel your mind’s eye go crossed. Antidote for cross-eyed minds:
Which and this must refer to clear antecedents.

I guess a “rule” would be:
Which should always have a clear antecedent expressed as a noun or a pronoun.
And for this: For clarity, always try to have this refer to a noun or a pronoun.

Sometimes you can get away with a vague this if the context is clear:
Enkidu and Gilgamesh do battle with a giant that is a cannibal and is ultimately defeated by being blinded. This should remind you of the one-eyed giant that Odysseus battles in The Oddyssy.

wrap….ddddnow moredd

Socrates: Wouldn’t you say, Grambon, that some modifiers are absolutely necessary?

Grambon: You mean like white elephant as opposed to just any elephant, big or small or hairy,
as elephants go? The homogenous elephant, the general?

Socrates: Well, yes and no. If I say the big elephant behind you has a trunkful of elephant phleghm…

[Grambon ducks and moves behind Socrates’ robe. Socrates reassures
him there is no elephant, big, white, hairy, nosey–only the idea of an elephant–
and coaxes him out from under his toga.]

Socrates, cont.: I’m thinking more like phrases and clauses. The elephant which is the largest of the pachyderms is sometimes lightly crossed with a peanut butter sandwich.

Grambon: What?

Socrates: Let me finish: there’s that elephant, with some nonessential info attached to it, the pachyderm business–that information has got nothing to do with the peanut butter part. But, now, compare this elephant:
The elphant which is in the very center of the herd is the sick one.
Now there your modifier that tells you which elephant it is, is essential. Otherwise you’d be aiming your dart gun at the wrong elephant. You want that particular elephant at the center of the herd.

Grambon: Why am I putting this elephant to sleep again?

Socrates: Because you want to cross it with a peanut butter sandwich. This isn’t easy, especially with a bull elephant like the one in the center of the herd. Some elephants don’t even like peanut butter.

Grambon: So to say.

Socrates: Good. You get my point then? If the modifying information is essential to what you want to say in the sentence, then it modifies so tightly that you don’t put pauses around it, you don’t whisper it or toss it off like it was inside some kind of invisible parentheses, and you certainly don’t put commas aound it.

Grambon: Certainly not.

Socrates: BUT, lad, if it’s just extra information, like, elephants mate for life, or elephants cry,
or elephants do such and such but that has no real bearing on the main point of your
sentence… Like: The elephant that you’re putting to sleep, which is by the way my
favorite elephant in the whole herd, has been known to wake up about twice as fast
as is expected from the dosage of pentathol.
that you’re putting to sleep > essential (no commas)
which is by the way my favoriete elephant in the whole herd > non-essential, can
do without it and the main meaning is unaffected; so, set it off (surround it!) with commas

Grambon: I see. The fact that you favor this elephant has nothing to do with the drug or the beast’s
tolerance for it, or even my tolerance for your imperious tone, you old fart!

Socrates: Speak up, lad. These ears aren’t elephant’s.

Grambon: I said I think I’ve got it, but I would love to have a memnonic, some little formula, some
bit of litmus paper that I could hold up to each situation to tell if it’s an essential or a non-
essential…elephant.

Socrates: Not elephant. Clause! We’re talking clauses here.

Grambon: I didn’t know elephants had claws.

[Socrates gives him a look, but Grambon
still feels he’s one up, for the nonce.]
Socrates: Do the parentheses test.

Grambon: Which is?

Socrates: Here, give me the dart gun and you take these parentheses. Now, approach your sentence
from the left, and if you can slip the parentheses in around the clause in question, then
you know it’s extra information, not essential to the sentence. Then you slip the parentheses
back out and replace them with commas, front and back.
Indian elephants, which by the way I shall tell you this is parenthetical information are famous for their memories,
are characterized by a high, concave foreheard, small ears, and tusks usually present in the
male only.
Get it? When you can slip in that by-the-way-I-shall-tell-you and it makes sense, then
you know you’ve got parenthetical, non-essential, non-restrictive, non-tusk-bearing in the
female information, and you surround it with commas.
And when you can say that-particular and that’s the sense you want, then it’s essential
and you don’t use commas. The elephant species which has tusks in both the male and female
is the Elephas africanus.
That information about tusks is part of the main point: the rest of the sentence without
it wouldn’t make much sense: The elephant species is the Elephas africanus. See? The
tusk information restricts the meaning. So what’s it called?

Grambon: Restrictive.
Socrates: What else?
Grambon: Essential.
Socrates: How do you test for it?
Grambon: See if that particular fits. And if it does, then no
parenthetical commas.
Socrates: Good. How do you test for the other one?
Grambon: You say… you try to slip in by the way I shall tell you and if it
fits, then you know your info is parenthetical, not essential, and
you set it off with parenthetical-type commas.
Socrates: Good. Now, give me those and put this thing away.

[Grambon somewhat awkwardly returns
the two parentheses to Socrates and receives
the dart gun from him. He stares at it.]

Grambon: This doesn’t have any darts.
Socrates: It was a theoretical elephant, Platonic if you will.
Grambon: What about the peanut butter? Platonic, too?
Socrates: In theory. But sometimes peanut butter is really peanut butter.
Grambon: And a pipe is just a pipe. But what if you cross them?
Socrates: A pipe, with peanut butter?
Grambon: An elephant. What do you get if you cross an elephant with a peanut butter sandwich?
Socrates: I’m not going to fall for that. You’re in the Foruum now.
Grambon: It was your joke!
Socrates: Certainly not. An elephant that always lands jelly-side down or something. Nonsense.
Grambon: Or a peanut butter sandwich thick with elephant phleghm.

The first thing to remember about rules is that they’re not invented to mess with your mind. No need to be intimidated by them, either.

They’re more like laws: this is what’s going on in your language now, and here, Dear Language User, is a description of that (i before e except after c, etc.). And if we can codify that description into a generalization, all the better.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed from one state to another.
Isn’t that the “law” of the conservation of energy? How long did it take mankind to put it into that succinct a statement? About seven thousand years? Ten thousand? Is it gonna change?
Not likely.

You get the point: ‘rules’ are just handy descriptions of what was or is going on in the syntax or the structure or the orthography (spelling) of the particular language, and when enough people get together to observe that the description does indeed describe what’s going down, and embraces most of the apparent exceptions, then what else can it do but settle in as a convention? Most of these conventionalized descriptions are of organic facts within the language: you form a plural usually by adding an s to the singular form of the noun. (Plenty of exceptions.)

But some ‘rules’ are actually arbitrary, and have to do with some one grammarian’s whim, or urge to clean up the language, reduce the confusion. The old shall/will/will for instance,
I shall, you will, he will (unless it’s a strong assertion, an imperative, in which case it reverses:
I will have that, you shall not go, he shall succomb), all comes from one scholar in 16th century England. He wrote it into his grammar and usage book, which everyone read, and it settled in as a rule! Boy, think of affecting your mother tongue to that degree! (I forget his name.)
Now there’s a rule that I would like to have invented.
Now there’s a rule which I would like to have invented.
Have you ever been hit with these? Don’t use which for a non-restrictive clause! That is a much tighter reference, etc., etc.
The ‘rule’ is: Use that to introduce restrictive clauses, and which to introduce nonrestrictive clauses.
I’ll spare you discussion of restrictive vs. nonrestrictive just now (if interested, click on
s-essential/nonessential clauses), because my point is that this ‘rule’ got invented in 1906 by the generally wonderful grammarian H. W. Fowler, who wanted a distinction up front between the two kinds of information–that which was essential to the meaning of the sentence, versus that which could be left out without hurting the main meaning of the sentence:

The English class that I hated the most was the one where the teacher ate popcorn.
The English class, which I hated, taught me more about life than my sex ed class.

You can see that one of those clauses is essential to the meaning–it restricts it, narrows it down–where the other is just added on, almost parenthetical information–it doesn’t restrict the meaning (nonrestrictive, nonessential). That’s all that’s going on here, but Fowler wanted different pronouns used, specific to how strongly they modified their noun–essentially, or parenthetically. And he wrote:
If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which
as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease. Some
there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the
practice of either most or the best writers.

So Fowler knew right well it wasn’t a “law of language,” but sad to say some of those that came after him waxed downright obsessive over it. I was punished for getting it wrong, as a kid. Physically abused, kneeling on bottle caps. (I rather liked that game because I learned the “rules” fast and then got to watch the other kids suffer. Thanks, mom & dad, for the leg up on that one.)

So, rules can be arbitrary, or they can refer to what’s really organically going on in the language,
and finally there are plenty of “rules” that are just downright wrong. See bogus rules .

So why, then, do they make us all so uncomfortable?
Why do we actually fear them?
Whence all this usage-unfriendly pain?

I think the reason we fear grammar, rules and spelling and mechanics and such, is that many of us were abused from early grammar school through high school and sometimes even into college by teachers that didn’t know better, or were abused themselves. This is the way they were taught, this is what they were taught–how else would we expect them to teach it? As the dog is beaten, so it cowers.

I had the backs of my hands whapped with a bamboo rod when I missed something in grammar or in math (same teacher), in my 4th grade. And I actually liked the guy! RIP, Mr. Cullelan.
In 5th grade, same school, if we were really stupid, we had to kneel on bottle caps facing the wall, hands held behind our backs. And this was in sunny Miami: we all wore shorts. It actually got my attention and I learned to keep who/whose/whom in their proper place.
But I’m not advocating the punitive approach. My 6th grade math teacher had my whammy in spades and that anxiety today…I can’t even count my blessings.

If you were ever made to feel crummy about your writing, or your grammar, those feelings linger on. Pity those among us whose teachers thought writing was grammar.

But I’m here to tell you, there is another, better reason to fear rules, to worry whether you spelled it right or used a comma just so or got the right dumb word that sounds the same but sure ain’t the same (they’re, there, their; you’re/your/yore; it’s/its; to/too/two).
Here’s the reason: language has always been used to support social and class distinctions. Speaking (or writing) “right” is part of social politics. Get it wrong, and those who can will use it to judge you, to exercise power over you, in some way, think less of you.
But . . . !
The flip side of that is, if you know how to do it right, then friends, colleagues, attractive young people, and imperious bosses will come to you to help them get it right. So, the very simple question is, which side of that dynamic do you want to be on?
Correllary: college is the place to finally learn it.

And the moral is: alot is two words: a (whole) lot D-lots

it’s is a contraction of it is (like don’t <= do not) G-its its is a possessive pronoun, already possessive: no ' its' is an abomination: beat it or laugh it out of existence you're is built like it's, a contraction, of you are Y-Your-There your is like its, a possessive pronoun: our, their, my, his, her, your lie & lay are pretty tricky, because the convention has changed on us but those who know better among us refuse to admit it. Full explanation at: lie/lay - v. -- This isn't hard: the dash and the hy- phen share only 50% DNA--with no spaces either side of dash See hyphen/dash affect/effect Click on E Effect-Affect supposed to One of those ones we pronounce so fast we don't hear the final d See I am prejudice. all right/alright We're headed for alright, just like always and already, but for now it looks hicky. No editor over 30 will accept it. All right? who/whom And other slipping case endings, see For Jen and I this & which as in avoiding a vague pronoun reference which is common [Does which refer to avoiding or reference? See this/which .]

Do you see those musical notes in the drawing above? Goofy Guy is whispering music notation.

And you are familiar with the notation for a musical rest, on a page of sheet music, yes? There are quarter rests and half rests and full rests–no sound, total silence smack in the middle of the piece where the mark is, lasting for an invisible beat or two (depending on the time signature).
Ok, here’s the big secret:
First of all, you need to internalize the fact that a comma is just a notation on the page that represents a brief pause in the reading. (beat, beat…) Whereas a period represents a longer pause, and a fresher start.

Below, read the word ‘beat’ out loud, in order to represent orally the moments of silence that a comma and a period stand for. The sentence and the fragment come from the paragraph just above:

Out loud, now:
First of all , you need to internalize the fact that a comma is a just a notation on the page that
(beat)
represents a brief pause in the reading . Whereas a period represents a longer pause , and a
(beat, beat) (beat)
fresher start . (Beat, beat, take a breath and: ) Below , (beat) read the word ‘beat’…and so on.

We could use a lot of things to represent this (meaningful) pause in the reading of a sentence. If you play the flute, for example, you’ll find in the beginner’s books that they use a raised comma to mark where you should take a breath:
, , ,
Twee twa dee tee twee twee toooooo teka tee teeka tee ta tee ta ta teee (whew!)

Or, we could use something handy on the keyboard like, say, s/ash /ines. Read aloud the comma and the period we used in the example above//out loud//and again now in the following excerpts: ////
First of all //you need to internalize the fact that a comma is a just a notation on the page
that represents a brief pause in the reading //// Whereas a period represents a longer pause //
and a fresher start /////

The secret of the comma is that it’s all just a matter of sound and silence notation. Commas are writers’ and printers’ marks telling the reader how best to read the text, sometimes for the sake of clarity, sometimes for niceties of meaning.
Onceuponatimeyouknowtheydidntputspacesbetweenthewordsmuchlesscommasforpauses. ANDACTUALLYTHOUGHIDONTKNOWIFITSANYWORSETHEYWROTEALLINCAPITALLETTERS

Well, do we have any other marks like this, that aren’t sounds but nonetheless affect the voice and the meaning? Yes, we do.
The ? , as you know, is another mark telling you to do something with your voice: it says, Make your voice go up at the end here, does it not ?

And the ! is like the judge’s gavel–pow ! [Generally, watch out for the ! in your writing. One good piece of advice is to use the exclamation point only when the word or line itself is stronger than the mark,
like WHACKO! ]

Final exam time.
Figure out how to fill out
the blue book or pick one [Art: blue book cover]
up off the floor somewhere,
put down a pseudonym and
a bogus SS#, and answer the
following question in one minute.
If you finish early, go right on.

The Question: If the ! and the ? both (purely
by convention) cause voice changes in the reader,
what voice change could the , be said to cause?
Helps: 1) , = comma
2) Think of the Paul Simon song, about the sounds of ____________ .

I know I promised no RULES, but if you’d like some help from yourself in your everyday punctuation, READ THE BLOODY THING ALOUD! Where you find yourself pausing/// that’s a place to think seriously about flicking down a comma//or slash lines if you can get your reader to go along//or a flowery doodle or something ////

Now, to some nitty gritty about the first three sets of common comma mistakes listed on the Table of Contents in the home page. And a change of color to go with a change of pace.
Items (a), (b), and (c) in the Homepage’s Contents are all covered by pretty much the same
“rule,” which is, you surround all those irritating little stops like yeses and no’s and wells and uh’s and oh’s, and people’s names when you name them–right , Charley?–you set them all off with commas.

Aids: “to set off” means to surround. Set off with commas means put one at the head and one at the tail. You can hear the pauses at the head and the tail if you’ll read it aloud: Well, no, John, not now. Oh, maybe later, but you, John, especially you–uh, what was I going to say?

Once more for the road: all those little hitches in a sentence, which have no place to hide if you’ll read them out loud, those things like expletives, speech dysfluencies (uhh.., er.., duh..), calling someone by name directly (referred to as ‘nouns of direct address’), they all have to be surrounded by commas or they won’t read right: WellnoJohnnotnow. OhmaybelaterbutyouJohnespeciallyyou is not how you want that line read, but it’s what you’re forcing an experienced reader to reproduce in their head, if you don’t tell them where to pause with your commas. So, besides creating a bad read out there, of your own precious thought and expression, you’ve also got someone thinking you’re stupid.
Maybe not stupid, but… [Art.Kevin]
An uneducated, unlettered, inexperienced reader. Not very literate. Why read them if I don’t have to?

That’s what goes on consciously or unconsciously in an experienced reader or
writer when you jam all the sense together and leave out the rests.
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, ‘ All those little words, with rests in front and back of ‘ ,
‘ , them? You set them off (which means surround) with ‘,
, commas.* ,
‘ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

(a) Well//John//I don’t really think so.
Well, I don’t really think so either, really.
John, do you think so? John? Oh, damnit, would
someone please give John a gentle smack?
(b) No, I’m not going to do that. Yes, I care about my
grade, but John is bigger than I am.
(c) Uh, he’s bigger than I am, too. Why don’t we just,
you know, leave him here.

* Department of the screamingly obvious:
If the word you’re surrounding with commas comes at the very front or very end
of a sentence, then you use the period or the capital to complete its surroundings:
No, this isn’t quite right, JohN.

Yes, no, uh, too, well, unh unh, yeah . . . These are the ones were talking about. They all get set off
(set off = surround) with commas. Yes, we have no bananas. You do, too! No, uh, I’m sorry, but we’re competely out. We can’t even see them, much less have any!

And then when you call someone by name–when you address them–in the text, directly, then they get surrounded with commas, too. If you’ll just listen, you’ll hear that you’re putting pauses around the name addressed, Jack, and you’ll hear that that is different from just using the name to talk about the person in the 3rd person pov:

John, are you with me? (John is never with us.)
We’d like for you, John, to at least smell the coffee. (We’d love it if John would only
wake up and smell the coffee.)

See the pauses around John when he gets spoken to? And those pauses have to be indicated with something, and the convention is: commas. Ok, babe, got that? Whether it’s a “noun of direct address” or a “proper noun of direct address,” it’s going to have those commas surrounding it, front and back. Whether you’re talking to your little baby doll or to Madame TaraShea, if you talk to them directly, person to person there on the page, then you pause fore and aft: So listen close, baby doll, and then I won’t have to call you TaraShea. Tara, are you listening? Hey, you. You with the feather. Come on, TS, help me out here.

Well, that’s enough on these little guys. Right, dear reader?

[Kevin art. Sleeping
Drodoo, snoring.]

by Lewis Thomas*

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity )))))))))))).

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows in all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer.

Colons are a lot less attractive for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you’re in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven’t sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Also, many writers use this system loosely and incompletely, starting out with number one and number two as though counting off on their fingers but then going on and on without the succession of labels you’ve been led to expect, leaving you floundering about searching for the ninethly or seventeenthly that ought to be there but isn’t.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks. If something is to be quoted, the exact words must be used. If part of it must be left out because of space limitations, it is good manners to insert three dots to indicate the omission, but it is unethical to do this if it means connecting two thoughts which the original author did not intend to have tied together. Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you’d like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clichés; if you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society. The most objectionable misuse of quotation marks, but one which illustrates the danger of misuse in ordinary prose, is seen in advertising, especially in advertisements for small restaurants, for example “just around the corner,” or “a good place to eat.” No single, identifiable, citable person ever really said, for the record, “just around the corner,” much less “a good place to eat,” least likely of all for restaurants of the type that use this type of prose.

The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you’re about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he’s back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period.

The greatest danger in punctuation is for poetry. Here it is necessary to be as economical and parsimonious with commas and periods as with the words themselves, and any marks that seem to carry their own subtle meanings, like dashes and little rows of periods, even semicolons and question marks, should be left out altogether rather than inserted to clog up the thing with ambiguity. A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work.

The things I like best in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Commas can’t do this sort of thing; they can only tell you how the different parts of a complicated thought are to be fitted together, but you can’t sit, not even to take a breath, just because of a comma,

* From The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979:103-6).

Here’s a helping of that abuse I talked about in Rules:

Don’t use fragments! Don’t use “I” in essays!
Don’t use “you” either. Or “we” while we’re at it.
It’s improper to split your infinitive: try to not ever split it.
Contractions, forget ’em!
And don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction.
Nor should you end a sentence with a preposition–that’s an
offense up with which we will not
put!
Use which to introduce non-essential (parenthetical) relative clauses
and that to introduce essential ones.

These aren’t really rules and in most of what I read–fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, dramas, essays, and in many many scholarly essays (not all)–these ‘rules’ would be wrong. Where do they come from then, besides highschool teachers that don’t write professionally and don’t notice what’s going on in what they read?

They, these “rules,” make sense in certain cases: very formal essays, or in scientific writing that’s trying to sound non-human, or in legal writing that doesn’t want to sound too informal, or with beginning writers that want to sound formal or pedantic, in order to be taken seriously, and so on. In such cases, such prescriptions have their place, but only relative to certain situations, audiences, purposes. They sure as hell aren’t rules.
And they are bogus, false, when they are made
absolute.

Before you shake them all off, though, here’s some wherefores about them:

Sentence fragments — “Never write a sentence fragment.”
Nonsense! Just know what you’re doing when you do use a fragment. Stylistically, fragments are very nice. They speed things along. Slow things down, too:
To be or not to be–that is the question. Whether t’is nobler in the mind to take up the whips and arrows of outrageous fortune or with a bare bodkin end them. Etc, etc. That whole long thing is a fragment, depending for its meaning on the sentence just in front of it. That’s what most fragments will do. Or the sentence right after it. Depend. On.

I, you, we — “Don’t use the first person; and avoid the pronoun you.”
We’ve all heard it, usually in highschool. Never say I or we in your paper. That way, one can write lovely stiff constructions like The reader is made to feel or It is the opinion of this writer that… or It is the opinion of some scholars, and this student of those scholars heartily agrees, that…
If that’s what floats your boat, go for it, I guess. To me it sounds like R2-D2 beeping into a voice box.

Just know your audience and what your purpose is. Everything but the most formal discourse uses I and we, and even there sometimes. As for you, it can come as a bit of shock nestled into formal prose:
If you study cancer long enough, you will discover that it is not one disease but a large group….

When you’ve been a rock star for most of your life, you sometimes can’t bear it not to be in the lime light. ==> Famous rock stars sometimes can’t bear to step out of the lime light.

to split or to not split — “Don’t split infinitives.”
Infinitives are forms of the verb that don’t have any time attached to them (no tense), and are usually indicated by the marker to . To be, or maybe not to be, or, what if the bard had said, To be
or to not be–there’s more than one question here.
So you wind up “splitting” these suckers if you insert anything between the to and the verb it belongs to. In most Indo-European languages you can’t do this: haben, hacer, avoir, avere, to have.
Since you can’t do it in most, purists arugued that you shouldn’t do it in English. Further, in constructions using it to refer to the infinitive: to sing was all she ever wanted; it was all she ever did… in this construction the it refers to the infinitive used as a noun, and if you split that infinitive, you’re messing up your noun, making it too ambiguous, violating its integrity: to never ever sing was wrong, but it was preferable in her case.
And not content with that, these rigorists then say it’s ok to split a past tense or passive voice infinitive, one that uses to be or to have: to have never broken any rules, to be perfectly understood,
underscoring the offending adulterant there. Can you tell we’re in Hogwash, USA?
What to do about grandmothers and retired highschool principals that wax nasty over these splits?
Humor ’em. Throw ’em a contraction maybe.

contractions — “Avoid contractions.”
In all but the most formal prose, you’ll see contractions. College papers…generally fine to use ’em.
I mean, are we really saying you have to write do not and cannot for don’t and can’t? One wonders about o’clock. It is three of the clock and I cannot for the life of me imagine where she is at.
Yeah, right.
Next time you’re in a university library, pull out some Ph.D. dissertations in literature and anthropology, say, and see if there are no contractions.

conjunctions — “Don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction.”
That’s actually blasphemous, that rule. If you’re not supposed to take God’s name in vain, how on earth is it right to correct his usage?
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
But the Lord was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and said maybe it’s ok to use a conjunction here and there to get thee going. And Joseph said phew. And then he said, God, do you think Shakespeare really wrote all those plays? But God, he was resting by then, fitfully. And then he said, Let the light be off.

So a conjunction is one of those common-as-house-flies little words that join sentence elements, whether they’re whole clauses, or just phrases or even single words. The callico cat and the gingham dog.
To be or not to be. When these words join equal elements–two nouns, two prepositional phrases, two independent clauses–they are said to co-ordinate the elements. The two would balance on a scale, gramatically. They have the same ordination within the sentence(s). And here they are:
and, but, for, or, nor, yet
There are other conjunctions that join unequal elements, one subordinated to the other, like:
if, whether, although, even+as,though,if
We sat down to dinner although we were wet. Run if you can. We didn’t like what she said even though she said it sweetly.
Subordinate conjunctions: the stuff following the conjunction is subordinate to the stuff not introduced by the conjunction. If you can, get the hell out of here.

I promised no rules, but if I could give you one rule that solved about 80 to 90% of all your
other comma dilemmas, a rule totally consistent with the put-a-comma-where-you-pause-
when-you-read-it-aloud rule (see Secret of all Commas for that one), but an enhancement of that
rule giving you about 190% assurance of no comma mistake, would you live through the below
lesson so you have the background for the rule to make sense?

The “rule” has to do mostly with introductory adverbial clauses, but it also covers adjectival phrases
and in fact all introductory phrases or clauses that can be followed by a comma. Occasions like these
following sentences about one of my favorite Butch-Cassidy-and-Sundance teams–Enkidu and
Gilgamesh, from the Babylonia Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000 B.C.).

Although Enkidu and Gilgamesh have just come from killing a huge monster , they are not having
an easy time of it with the Bull of Heaven.

Grabbing onto the bull’s horns , Enkidu tries to lower the head so Gil can get a clear bull-fighter’s
thrust down through the shoulder blades.

While the heroes battle with the bull , the goddess Ishtar is off rubbing her hands in glee, expecting
to be fully revenged for Gil’s insults.

To make this Bull of Heaven truly imposing , the artist has drawn it breaking the frame line.

Because we’ve strained your attention span here (speaking of insults) , we will now give you
a graphic representation of the battle with the Bull of Heaven.

Pretty cute, eh? So stick with us; more to come after you do battle with the following terminology:
phrase, clause, introductory, verbal, verb . (Also finite and subordinate. Sorry!)

Here’s the “rule,” which is really two rules packed into one:

i p c v v ,

stands for:
Any introductory phrase with a verbal, or clause with a verb, in it, can always be followed
by a comma. You’ll never be wrong if you put the comma in. 100% non-wrong.

Any introductory phrase or clause, with a verbal or a verb in it…slap down the comma
and you can’t go wrong. Enkidu and Gilgamesh, who took on far worse challenges than that, never ever had that kind of assurance. Check out what’s been going on while we’ve been working here:

All we need now, besides pick up the pieces, is to be sure about what a verbal is, right? Let’s assume you know “verb”…all those words that express action: express, need, is, know, eat, fight, snort, aim, gore, beware, battle, kill, strain, have, thrust, zzooop, yoink, skreee, go, take, wait, mate, hate, crap, clap, slap….to name a few from the immediate environment, are all verbs. They’re words that name an action, as opposed to a thing or an idea. So, to move on…

Well, wait. What’s the difference again between a main verb and a subordinate verb?

Main verb = it can stand all by itself, it’s independent of any other verb. I say. say is the main verb. Enkidu zzoooped through the air, clutching the bull’s horns. zzoooped is main verb.
The bull yoinked Enkidu like beaten chaff, while his back hooves skreed the ground.
yoinked is the main verb; skreed is a subordinate verb, made subordinate by while.

Subordinate verb = it’s not the main verb. I say that you should already know this. should know is a verb all right, but it won’t stand by itself: That you should already know this. is not something you can whisper even to your significant other right off the top. It’s subordinate to something main.

Ok for subordinate, ok for introductory…how about adverbial?
There are loads of introductory adverbs, like because, when, while, whenever, since, as, however, as soon as that force the verb they introduce, force it into a subordinate (to the main verb) position:
Gilgamesh insulted Ishtar because he knew what she did to all her lovers.

When Enkidu got hold of the bull’s tail, he got a big surprise.

As soon as the bull was dead, Ishtar went bawling on the ramparts. Woe is Ish.

Since these subordinate clauses, introduced by adverbs (when, while, as, ungh, etc.)
all tell you more about the main verb . . .
Gil insults Ishtar because…
Enkidu gets his surprise when…
Ishtar goes bawling as soon as…
Enkidu goes Ungh!! and the bull goes Graahgooahh!while they went round.

…that is, they modify the main verb, telling you the when or why or how about it, then they are adverbial clauses, since adverbs, including adverbial clauses, modify verbs (also adjectives and other adverbs, but let that go for now). And as we’ve seen, these verbs introduced by these adverbs are subordinate to the main verb.
As soon as the bull was dead, Sally! (You can’t say that and make full sense.)
As soon as the bull was dead, we chowed down. (You can say that, particularly if you’re a vulture.)

But here, the bull isn’t dead just yet:

And the rule runs in part:
Any introductory clause with a verb in it, can always be followed by a comma. If the clause is short
and really really clear, then you can skip the comma. But you’ll never be wrong if you insert one.

Never. So forget that correllary for now and just bull your way in with a comma.

Most of these introductory subordinate clauses will be adverbial. There are also phrases that will occur up front, at the head of the sentence, and when they have a verb-like word in them, they can always be set off:

Realizing that a phrase is a group of related words, and noticing that this particular group of related words came at the head of the sentence, he felt quite confident about slapping down his big red comma.

To survive the last week of a semester, one had best have slept the month before.

Those underlined verb-like words are called verbals. They’re verbs, but they don’t have any time attached to them–they aren’t finite, locked into a present or past or future.
He will always survive…that surviving is locked into the future. She survived my tedious lecture… there she’s doing her surviving in the past. But, to survive is what it’s all about, or, To survive a nuclear war, you had best be on the moon… those two survives don’t have any time attached to them: they are infinite. (They are infinitives, in fact.) That’s all that’s meant by finite versus infinite verbs: time.

So, again, any introductory phrase with a verbal in it, can always be followed by a comma.
And that’s a lot like ‘any introductory clause with a verb in it can always ” ” ” ” ‘,
so why not stick the two together:

Any introductory phrase with a verbal, or clause with a verb, put down a comma.

Any introductory phrase or clause with a verbal or a verb in it,
can be followed by a comma.

i p c v v followed by a ,

Enkidu could get vvwhipped around all day, while Gil seeks a vulnerable spot.

Because we don’t have the finished art ready for the next frame, we have to go to the storyboard,
which may not scan so well. ^

And to do that right, I need Mandi anyway.
^
Notice, there’s an introductory adverbial clause, and then an introductory verbal phrase, and both are followed by commas and both are exactly right. Would you write either of them without the comma?
Because we don’t have the finished art ready for the next frame we have to go to the storyboard.
To do that right we need Mandy.
I still put the pause in, at the end of the introductory stuff; so I would definitely put the comma in. But, following my ipcvv rule , I don’t really have to think about it.

As for Enkidu, he gets into some pretty deep doo doo near the end of the battle. Hard to believe it was written 3500 years ago…it looks so comic-booky, but doo doo was always funny, I guess–to some.
(Like father like son!)

[Kevin art: Enkidu at the
tail of the bull, etc.]