Our daily news diet now brings us scintillating reports on the Oxford comma and the meaning of quotation marks. What a delightful spring diversion from a depressingly bleak winter of Trump atrocities. Punctuation has always generated a level of electric excitation and enthusiasm on a par with, say, a convention of actuaries. Aside from small cohorts of passionate grammarians, reveling in the nuances of commas and the elegance of a well-placed ellipsis, most of us have paid little attention to the subject since we left middle school.
That was obviously our mistake, for punctuation is power. Just ask those Maine truck drivers for Oakhurst Dairy who are about to pick up a ton of overtime pay thanks to a comma that wasn’t there. They were the heroes of the Oxford comma story that made headlines these past few days. In case you missed it, check the link if you want to wander into the weeds of sentence structure. Otherwise this abbreviated Cliff note ought to do: The drivers went after four years of unpaid overtime. The company said the they were exempt under state law. The judge ruled them eligible for the time-and-a-half pay on the basis of a missing comma in the statute. Every demeaned English teacher in Maine suddenly had a perfect answer to their students’ question of, “Why do we have the learn this stuff?”.
Even Trump jumped on the punctuation bandwagon this week. When his lie about Obama wiretapping him went up in flames, the president suddenly turned into a strict language constructionist. He noted that he placed quote marks around “wiretapped” in his accusatory tweet. In The Donald’s style book, such punctuation expands the word’s meaning to include any form of surreptitious eavesdropping, from an ear against a door to, as his faithful whisperer Kellyanne Conway suggested, a microwave oven.
If punctuation has the power to turn a wiretap into a microwave, it is nothing to be trifled with. The truth of the matter is that punctuators have forever left their marks on our perpetual search for meaning. For example:
• The use of a comma instead of a dash caused the most expensive typographical error in congressional history. The Tariff Act of 1872 listed specific goods that were to be exempt from the import tax. Congress had intended to place “fruit-plants” on the tax exempt list, but the final version of the law used a comma instead of a dash: “fruit, plants,” instead of “fruit-plants”. As a result, no tax could be collected on fruit or plants of any kind. The loss of revenue amounted to $40 million in today’s dollars.
• A semicolon in the Texas Constitution invalidated an election and ignited a mass revolt. An angry and unstable Reconstructionist governor, obsessed with succession, was defeated by a Democrat in 1873. The legislature had changed the voting from four consecutive days in each county seat to one day in each precinct. That modification was the basis for the Texas Supreme Court to throw out the election. Because of a semicolon’s placement in the constitution’s election language, the justices said the legislature could change the voting venue but not the length of the polling period. Texans were so outraged that they rioted in the streets. The anger lingered for decades and the justices who wrote the decision were forever referred to as the “Semicolon Court.” According to a piece written for the Notre Dame Law Review, Texas lawyers to this day are so ashamed of the “Semicolon Decision” that they refuse to cite it as a legal authority.
• A million dollar comma brought a pair of Canadian communication giants to court. Rogers and Bell Aliant entered into a business contract that was to last five years and for subsequent terms of five years after that, “unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Bell tried to end the deal with a one-year notice shortly after the contract was signed. Rogers said the agreement could only be terminated after five years. The initial finding was in favor of Bell, based on the placement of a comma. Through the wonders of bilingualism, however, Rogers won the day. Turns out that the contract was prepared in both English and French and the latter version was missing the comma.
• A missing comma won a not guilty verdict for a Columbus, Ohio woman who left her pickup truck on a city street for more than 24 hours. Andrea Cammelleri, obviously paid attention in her English class. According to the Columbus Dispatch, she told the judge that the ordinance banning daylong parking covers “any motor vehicle camper, trailer, farm implement. . .” The judge agreed that the lack of a comma after “motor vehicle,” necessarily excludes pickup trucks from the ban. Case dismissed.
• Another comma that wasn’t there continues to keep records on police shootings private in Tennessee. The state’s bureau of investigation looked into the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old black man by a white Memphis police officer. The Memphis City Council issued a subpoena for the bureau’s case files. A judge looked at the statutory language dealing with police shootings. It says such records can be released “only in compliance with a subpoena or an order of a court of record.” The ruling? Because the clause is lacking a comma, both the subpoena and the order must come from a court, not a city council or other non-judicial authority. For lack of a comma, the records remain sealed.
In another generation or two, all of this comma and semicolon stuff may go the way of the typewriter and rotary phone. As you read this sentence, academic linguists are busy dissecting tweets, texts and posts. Their early findings? Social media writing is almost punctuation free, except for liberal use of exclamation marks. Imagine a future court trying to interpret legislative intent by counting exclamation points. And issuing a decision that says, simply, “WTF!!!!!!!”.