Wolf it Down, Red Riding Hood! - The Comatose Comma

Nostalgia, a treacherously attractive mistress, is a constant temptation. Inasmuch as I might croon a chorus of 'Ring a ring a Rosie' after a heavy gargle, particularly as the light declines, I do not especially yearn for the return of 'Dubbalin city in the rare, oul' times'.

Nor, it must be said, do I lament the demise of Franco's regime, essentially because I was only thirteen when the Caudillo died and my memories of Spain began at that precise moment, when Spanish society simultaneously began its rapid metamorphosis from libertarian to libertine.

Notwithstanding, I am tired of the corruption engendered by politicians most munificent with the public purse but reticent about using their own. Moreover, as Bambi - the nickname given to Spain's hapless, incompetent buffoon of a prime minister - sends the deficit soaring into the stratosphere and with it the probability that my olive-skinned grandchildren will still be paying the debt when they die, what I am nostalgic for is the frugality of Franco's financial regime.

The Generalissimo was notorious for his asceticism; as an appropriate aphorism has it, he was tighter than a bullfighter's pants. The uncle of a good friend of mine happened to be the Captain of Franco's yacht, the Azor, and upon one occasion, when he was a young boy, my friend accompanied his uncle on a visit to the Palacio del Pardo; the Generalissimo's official residence when in Madrid.

His abiding memory was one of extreme austerity bordering on parsimony. Entire halls without even a chair, endless walls with no coverings; what with the peasants revolting and the masses impatient for democratic reform, the palace's occupant obviously had much more to keep him occupied with the Office of State rather than with the trappings of it.

Franco's last wage slip is a living testament to his exemplary economising. The majority of his retribution came from his army rank and distinctions earned on active service. His many detractors would do well to remember that whatever Franco might have become in later life, he was the youngest general in Europe and possibly in European military history; a rank he attained well before the outset of the Spanish Civil war. The Caudillo's final monthly salary as Head of State, paid a week after his demise on 20th November 1975, came to a total of 154,710 pesetas, less than €930; do Brian Cowen, Gordon Brown or Barack O'Bama honestly provide better value for money?

Spanish bureaucracy, well known for its impenetrable, byzantine nature, is almost impossible for anyone to circumnavigate. Inflexible and protectionist in the extreme, it is almost corporate in culture, particularly when it comes to self service and self interest; which happen to be the mottos on its coat of arms.

In Franco's day there were just 500,000 civil servants in the entire country; now there are over five million which - if you have official business to transact, you would be forgiven for thinking - this army of funcionarios ought to expedite matters somewhat. Notwithstanding, try and set up a business in Spain, apply for a permit of any kind or even attempt to get your qualifications recognized so that you can work in your chosen profession; if just one comma is out of place, then you will accomplish nothing.

Even a cursory glimpse of your bank statement can induce a veritable blast of vertigo as the twenty-five grand you thought you had is reduced at first glance to 25 point zero, zero, zero. Then you sigh with relief as you remember that in the inventory of numerals, the Spanish use a different convention to everyone else; rather than separate the thousands by a comma, they use a full stop, and instead of a decimal point to separate an integer part of a number from its fractional part, they use a comma; thus €25,000 in a Bank of Ireland account would read €25.000, 00 in its Banco Santander equivalent.

Spain is different as the local saying goes, and is a very illogical and often exasperating place, as anyone who has resided there for over two decades is qualified enough to tell you. However, if one considers the comma in its most basic function: separating items in a list; an indication - if you will - that some kind of continuum of like and kind follows, then the Spanish system of numbers falters on even that most common of denominators.

In the case of Franco's stipend, the comma, used as per our convention, would separate the one hundred and fifty-four thousand pesetas from the other seven hundred and ten of their kind. However, given that the Spanish system of numbers is completely irrational compared to any other nationality writing in Arabic numerals, it would seem that the Caudillo's last salary was comprised of merely one hundred and fifty-four 'potatoes' as I affectionately remember them; the remainder is reduced to just a fraction; splinters of a whole. Whichever way you look at it, as heads of state go, Franco was as cheap as chips. (Poor pun intended).

Other cultures' conventions aside, I often experience a wistful longing for the classroom days of yore, when multiplication tables were learnt by rote and not on an iPhone calculator app; when children were taught syntax and orthography - or grammar and spelling as they were known back in the halcyon days of the three Rs.

When I started out in Spain teaching English as a foreign language, many, many years ago, to my utter astonishment I often found myself forsaking the exercise book and repeating instead the explanations of my English teachers of yesteryear. Particularly to those classes comprised of younger children for whom simplicity - if you are to succeed in your goal and get your point across - is an absolute necessity. For instance:

"What is an adjective?"
"It's a describing word."
"What does it describe?"
"How something is."

In a similar vein:

"What is an adverb?"
"It's a describing word."
"What does it describe?"
"How we do something."

Granted, we can hold a debate about the use of a more precise nomenclature: passive or demonstrative adjectives, adverbs of manner or frequency et al, at a later date. Notwithstanding, the terminology is at least entering the kids' lexicon and when matters do become more complicated they will, at the very least, know what an adjective or an adverb is and what its most basic functions are.

I would challenge any Minister for Education for these islands to put the same questions to any class in the country of eight year olds or to their teachers for that matter. Particularly if the pedagogues happen to be victims of the luvvy educational 'reforms' of the late 1970s or even worse; their direct descendents: that extremely unfortunate generation of students who were unlucky enough to be 'taught' by those who had cavalierly discarded the rulebook. I would wager that the minister in question will discover who shot JFK before he or she gets a correct answer.

Punctuation is no different. Acolytes of the No Punctuation school of thought - yet another crowd who put the 'moron' in oxymoron - drive me to complete and utter distraction. There can be absolutely no case to answer, whatever pseudo-intellectual gibberish these deluded souls may espouse, citing - as they are wont to do - artistic license or freedom of form. What is the point of writing anything if what you write - via the purposeful exclusion of punctuation - is completely and utterly incomprehensible to any reader?

Admittedly, punctuation or lack thereof was no impediment to our old pal Jimmy Joyce. Just ask Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon who after thirty years of 'work' on Finnegans [sic] Wake have made over 9000 'changes' [read 'corrections'] to the "punctuation marks; fonts; spacing; misspellings, misplaced phrases and ruptured syntax".

Thirty years is an incredible amount of time to dedicate to correcting a book that will still prove to be incomprehensible; mutton dressed as lamb, if you will. Particularly so when after even a perfunctory glance at the text it would appear that Joyce had written it in just under thirty minutes.

All of which is ultimately inconsequential; the publication of Finnegan's Wake and its championing by naïve nincompoops gained guaranteed, everlasting notoriety for ould Shem, who even garnered an assemblage of academic groupies into the bargain; albeit of the gormless, insignificant kind.

I refer principally to those unfortunate souls who - when not being brought to the assizes in Dublin for the wearing of loud blazers in a built up area - while away their despondent days, eking out an existence at Crackerville Community College over in Kansas; ceaselessly trying to second guess the tome's secreted significance in the forlorn hope of a lifetime's tenure at a more exalted citadel of erudition. Sorry to dishearten you, lads; but there is none: Finnegan's Wake is complete and utter babble.

A much more pernicious punctuation pervert than Joyce - who in mitigation could at least claim ignorance - is none other than e.e. himself; whose cummings and goings (poor pun intended) with convention, id est, a complete and utter paucity of punctuation and even poorer parsing, proved no problem in procuring a publishing deal.

It is enough to make one pine for the pioneering days of pre-Nazi Paris, when anyone with a pair of stamps in a passport and the remnants of a ticket to a bullfight found himself well on the road to becoming a literary legend. I, for one, would be most interested to ask this gentleman who so wantonly eschewed the protocols of punctuation, how he managed to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard. Well, e.e.'s gone now (poor pun intended), so I guess we'll never know.

As Lynne Truss pointed out in her controversial, amphibologically entitled: 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', inaccurate use of the common comma, or worse still, dispensation with it entirely, automatically exposes the writer to many a mishap; the most obvious being the potential for gross misunderstanding. Nonetheless, why any book extolling the correct use of the English language and its conventions should be considered 'controversial' is in itself a rueful reflection of what has come to pass.

For the benefit of those too indolent to consult the dictionary, the amphibology, an ambiguous grammatical construction, used in the title of Ms Truss's oeuvre - gun-toting panda bear notwithstanding - is a benign and even innocent example of what can happen to a text by the addition or omission of a comma and how its significance can be irrevocably transformed. Compare the following:

Louis XVI ambled around and chatted to his subjects; half an hour after, his head was chopped off.

Or

Louis XVI ambled around and chatted to his subjects half an hour after his head was chopped off.

What a terrifying prospect! I can only presume he popped into Marie Antoinette's preferred patisserie for a slice of cake to put the time in.

USAGE

1) The comma in its simplest form is used to indicate a pause between the different clauses of a sentence:

If you think the hotel staff is rude, you should see the manager.

Take away the comma and the recommendation becomes a comparative.

If you think the hotel staff is rude you should see the manager. (That is to say, the manager is ruder than his staff!)

2) We also use the comma to separate items in a list. However, at the end of the list we don't use a comma before the final conjunction [which is usually 'and'].

This year I've visited the Prado, the Louvre, the Uffizi Gallery and the Rijksmuseum.

If the list is made up of compound nouns or items composed of more than one word, then it is better to separate them with a semi-colon as opposed to a comma:

I'd like a pound of apples; a couple of bananas; a bottle of that liquid stain remover you gave me last week; three tubes of toothpaste and four cans of Guinness, please.

3) In a similar vein, we use the comma to separate coordinate adjectives that are qualifying the same noun directly and are of equal value. Coordinate adjectives can be identified by the following rule of thumb: if the order in which they are written can be altered with no change to the meaning, or if the conjunction 'and' could be inserted between them. Thus:

The tedious, tiresome lesson seemed to last forever.

In this example both 'tedious' and 'tiresome' are equal in status and are both describing the 'lesson'. Their order can be changed with no loss of meaning:

The tiresome, tedious lesson seemed to last forever.

Apply the rule of thumb to test it [and].

The tiresome and tedious lesson seemed to last forever.

However, when the adjectives qualifying a noun have different values, such as adjectives of shape, size, colour, et al, no commas are used.

"There he stood, all alone, the little white bull."

[An established order of adjectives does exist; it will be covered elsewhere].

4) We use commas to separate main clauses from subordinate clauses, that is to say, two clauses that are related, with one bearing important information, and the other information of an ancillary kind.

I chopped down all the chestnut trees, which were over five metres tall.

The first clause in this instance being the main clause; without this clause the rest of the sentence would have no meaning. Omit the comma, however, and the sentence changes in meaning:

I chopped down all the chestnut trees which were over five metres tall.

In the first sentence, all of the chestnut trees were chopped down. In the second, only the trees taller than five metres were cut down.

5) The same is true of parenthetical clauses; a type of subordinate clause inserted into a text which adds information but is not vital to the meaning of the sentence; rather like information contained within parentheses, otherwise know as 'brackets'. We insert such a clause using commas:

His father, a frustrated and bitter man, died last year.

The most important clause in this sentence is 'His father died last year.' Without this information, the rest of the phrase makes no sense. The parenthetical clause gives us background information as to the character of the father. It is not as important and therefore subordinate to the main clause.

6) In sentences beginning with an adverbial clause, e.g.: 'if', 'when' etc. we use a comma:

When you get to Dublin, give me a call.

The comma is omitted if the clauses are inverted, as the adverb 'when' becomes a conjunction:

Give me a call when you get to Dublin.

7) Similarly, we use commas to insert adverbs or 'adverbial phrases' composed of various words between the subject and the verb:

Ireland, surprisingly enough, failed to qualify for the World Cup Finals.

Or between the verb and its complement:

The accused is, believe it or not, innocent of all charges.

8) This is also the same for non-defining relative clauses. A defining relative clause describes the noun before it in such a way that there can be no doubt about what or whom we are talking about:

The lady who cleans my house has gone back to Moldova.

If we omit 'who cleans my house', it is uncertain as to which lady we are talking about. In a non-defining relative clause there is no cause for confusion, as the person or thing we are talking about is already unequivocally established. In much the same way as the parenthetical clause seen earlier, it is merely additional information and is contained between two commas:

Maria, who cleans my house, has gone back to Moldova.

9) Numbers. As we have seen in the aforementioned text, commas are used to separate groups of three digits; millions and thousands:

Last night a guy from Mullingar won €2,555,644 [euro] in the lotto.

In the American convention of English, a comma is also used after the ordinal number when writing the date:

March 17th, 2010.

10) We also use a comma when introducing someone in writing, using the surname first:

His name was Bond, James Bond.

Also when adding an honorific or title after the surname:

Marcus Welby, M.D.

Marcus Welby, M.D.! Ah, now; there's nostalgia for you! They don't make 'em like that any more. Is there a doctor in the house?

There certainly isn't a doctor like Marcus Welby, M.D. in 'House'. Why must everyone be uncouth and curmudgeonly to get ahead in this day and age? Does this amount to what serves as entertainment in modern society; watching people bear the most bizarre infirmities until some dysfunctional boor in a white coat appears and who may, or may not, come up with a diagnosis just in time? Do the scriptwriters have competitions to see who can come up with the most exotic infirmity imaginable?

Were punctuation to play the part of the patient then the writing would well and truly be on the wall for the comatose comma; the analogical equivalent of the humble spark plug in automation, if you will. So simple, yet without its presence or correct usage, nothing in writing really works.

Sadly, it would seem, the market for fairytale endings has crashed. If the proof of the pudding is to be found in the eating, just ask Little Red Riding Hood. Depending upon who happens to be in bed, it's a case of 'Let's eat, Grandma.' Or, 'Let's eat Grandma.' Either way, as matters stand, the outlook for the comma is looking extremely Grimm.

David Kennedy
http://www.writing4all.ie/site/members/view/david_kennedy.htm