Comma to me

Language truly is peculiar and the English language particularly so. Words that are pronounced the same yet spelled differently–there, their and they're. Words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings–lead and lead, sow and sow, wind and wind. Synonyms, homonyms and acronyms. Idioms and slang. What a mess!

My hat is off to anyone who learns English as a second language; I have trouble enough as one born into an English-speaking culture–sort of. By comparison, German, which is perfectly phonetic, is a snap–even with all that der-die-das business.

Reading English is easy enough, I suppose. Conversing in English is somewhat more difficult. But... give a man a writing assignment and he'll break into a cold sweat. I've had students in college classes who would rather hang by their thumbs for a week than sit down write a term paper.

One real bugaboo of written English is the necessity for punctuation. One can speak without commas, colons and semicolons. But when it comes to the written page, something has to be done to partition the thoughts and ideas, one from another.

A single comma can alter meaning altogether. Take the four words: eats shoots and leaves. Place a comma after "eats" and the two nouns morph into verbs. And you've got the makings for a racy joke involving Panda bears. Oddly enough, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is the title of a nifty little book that may change the way you feel about our language. If you pay attention while you're laughing at book's subtle humor, you may come away feeling less anxious about whether "to comma or not to comma." I can almost guarantee that you will be amused.

The full title of the book is: Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynn Truss. Your local library may have a copy and then there's (theirs? they'res?) always Amazon.com.

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