The Comma Will Save Us All
This weekend while rummaging around antique stores in Saint Paul, I picked up a 1962 copy of The New York Times Style Book for Writers and Editors. I hope to use the edition along with Strunk and White to bring my grammar and spelling on these pages up from the deep depths of awful to the shallow waters of just bad. The process could be a slow one.

There’s a lot of good information packed in these pages. For instance, I had forgotten that words like Linotype, Tabasco, Technicolor and Teleprompter are all trademarked brand names and not simply generic nouns used to describe things (see also: Kleenex and FedEx). But my favorite part of the book is this little grammar nugget explaining the proper use of the comma:

“The absence of commas in His brother George was best man means that the bridegroom has more than one brother. If there is only one brother, George should be set off by commas. Thus a monogamous society must be well supplied with commas: His wife, Nancy, was not there.

That’s right folks. Really the only thing that’s holding the moral fabric of our country together, preventing a collapse into which thousands experiment loosely with polygamist policies, is our often overlooked friend, the comma. I think armed with that knowledge, we can all agree that the comma shall be sacrosanct and used with gleeful abandon. It is our moral duty.

And while you are contemplating the comma, you should also meditate on this other nugget that I gleaned from a different book find:

“Only those who can appreciate the least palatable of vegetable roots know the meaning of life”
Discourses on Vegetable Roots – Hung Tzu-ch’eng