Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Also on her desk was a canister, with a perforated lid, about the size of a shaker for red-pepper flakes in a pizzeria, wrapped in brown paper, on which she had drawn commas and the words “Comma Shaker.” This was Lu’s comment on The New Yorker’s “close” style of punctuation: she thought we used too many commas.

He had known Kerouac and Ginsberg at Columbia, and after a drink or two he would start saying things like “Dig it, man.”

But a modern Anglican version, dating from 1988, makes it simply “Our Father in heaven,” which is restrictive: our heavenly father, not our earthly one.

The Latin, which comes to us from Saint Jerome, is “Pater noster, qui es in caelis.” Nonrestrictive. You can hear the commas.

Is “who art in Heaven” restrictive or nonrestrictive? Just where is God? I think it is nonrestrictive, as indicated by the comma before “who”; that is, the phrase “who art in Heaven” doesn’t define the Father, it just tells where he lives.

(“an adjective clause which adds information”)

Do you see the difference between “The year that just ended was bad for crops” and “This year, which has been dry, was bad for crops”? With “this year,” we already know which year the writer is talking about: you could write with perfect clarity, “This year was bad for crops.” You could also write, “The year was bad for crops,” but in the context you’d need to know what year was meant; adding “that just ended” identifies the year.

Americans have agreed to use “that” when the clause is restrictive and to use “which,” set off with commas, when the clause is nonrestrictive. It works pretty well.

The original purpose of a comma was to separate, and a restrictive clause does not want to be separate from what it modifies: it wants to be one with it, to be essential to it, to identify with it totally.

But it is just the opposite: a restrictive clause is so much a part of the noun it modifies that it doesn’t need any punctuation to stake its claim.