Comma Chameleon

Hi, my name is Ike (surname withheld), and I have a problem.

For years, I have been a serial abuser. Without regard to those around me, I have taken advantage of punctuation for my own personal gain.

My teachers along the way, both in elementary and junior high, warned me of my folly. They often told me I nailed every other punctuation issue without fail, but for some reason, I could not seem to resist the temptation to insert “unnecessary commas.”

“Grammatically those are unnecessary,” they’d say. Only, I’d write it “Grammatically, those are unnecessary.”

I tried to explain that I was writing for my ear. “When I place a comma in a sentence, it’s an indication of where I would pause, as an extra way of ensuring the reader would catch my full meaning,” I’d say. To no avail.

They warned me that superfluous commas would be a “gateway mark” toward other punctuation abuse! I might grow up to be one of those people who makes every statement an imperative! Or worse!!! Using multiple exclamation points!!!

I was able to put the commas away for a long time. For more than 12 years as a television reporter, the commas barely appeared, mostly in numbers 1,000 and up. Of course… I used the punctuation equivalent of the nicotine patch… the oft-excoriated ellipsis. However… I found a willing band of professionals… who… very much like me… wrote for the ear… and not the eye. The ellipsis in television news is the catch-all of punctuation… when speed matters… who needs to dicker around with formalities. AND FOR THAT MATTER… WHO NEEDS TO MESS AROUND WITH LOWERCASE LETTERS EITHER… YOU’D BE HARD PRESSED TO FIND A NEWSROOM WHERE *SOMEONE* HASN’T UNDONE THE CAPS-LOCK KEY IN YEARS… (and you wonder sometimes why it seems as though the people on teevee are yelling at you…)

I’ve given up the ellipses, but found I came right back to my initial love, the comma. I’ll fight to the very last day to preserve this point of punctuation. But the day is coming. Already, dictionaries are ditching the hyphen, as text messaging and email are changing the way we write. (I guess it is in fact email, instead of e-mail…)

And now, apparently a Brazilian district governor is banning the use of the present participle.  Apparently, too many government workers are using “false present tense” to make it look like something is happening, when there hasn’t been any progress in a while.  Much in the same way your local teevee news-reader (or is it “newsreader”) tells you “The council votes to suspend liquor sales,” or “a bizarre accident kills four lab mice.”

Now, if we can only figure out how we can make him a managing editor at the teevee stations…

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, language, English, humor, television[/tags]