Wednesday, November 28, 2018

The Oxford Comma

The Question of the Oxford Comma reared it’s ugly head today, so since I was weak on exactly what it is, I looked it up in Wikipedia. That was a mistake.

Wikipedia has more than I ever want to know about the Oxford comma. So much more that I chucked the reading of it after the Case of the Missing Comma aka O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. Frank and Joe Hardy would have done a more engaging story. Heck, their mother could have, and she seemed to devote most of her time to baking cookies, or possibly running cocaine to Chicago, but F.W. Dixon never discussed that, so I don’t know for sure. She seemed way too good to be on the up and up. I’m less familiar with the cases of Nancy Drew, but I’m entirely satisfied she would have run rings around O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy while hedging her investments in the ax murder industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

Good grief. This is the sort of article which so turned me off to language studies that I cannot for my very life tell you what an adverb is, nor a participle, dangling or otherwise, nor can I gin up the interest to remember even if someone were wishful, or wistful enough, as the case may or may not be, to tell me. Things of such dubious repute exist; that is sufficient and more. Participles and adverbs are like venereal diseases: I know there are people acutely, even joyously, involved in promulgating them, but I have no interest in joining.

I bet Dante didn’t know either (insert a comma or not, as you please) (had some nefarious meddler even invented participles and other such abominations by Dante’s day? Whoever foisted that horror upon us should have done some terminal dangling him or even herself, ideally from a naturally occurring oak cantilever) and he got around to write a decent thing or two. At least so some claim. Personally, I take my linguistical and culinary guidance alike from my hero and role model Huckleberry Finn. To wit:

While an inmate in the Widow Douglas’ house: "When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better."

An even finer, and earlier manifestation of something, I can’t decide what, but surely literary, is Robinson Crusoe and his magnificent run on sentences, such as and to wit again:

After Crusoe was shipwrecked on his island and began to establish himself there, he discovered some stalks of rice and barley growing near his home. At first he was touched by God's goodness, but:

“At last it occurred to my thoughts that I had shaken a bag of chickens' meat [sic, that’s grain] out in that place, and then the wonder began to cease; and I must confess my religious thankfulness to God's providence began to abate too upon discovering that all this was nothing but what was common; though I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen providence as if it had been miraculous: for it was really the work of Providence as to me that should order or appoint that ten or twelve grains of corn [sic] should remain unspoiled (when the rats had destroyed all the rest), as if it had been dropped from heaven; as also that I would throw it out in that particular place, where, it being in the shade of a high rock, it sprang up immediately; whereas, if I had thrown it anywhere else at the time, it had been burned up and destroyed.”

Now, that’s a sentence worthy of the writing. It’s unpretentious, it runs along, like a squash vine on the ground, putting out a fruit or some flowers now and then for one’s delectation, then turning back on itself and repeating in another direction without entirely losing the point, and meanders about until it decides it’s finished. It marches on, not boldly, but unselfconsciously, without worrying about participles, whatever they may be. Its a sentence the way sentences ought to be and sometimes were before the perfessers took ahold of them by the neck and strangled the life out of them and beat them on a rock like a piece of laundry just to be sure.

Another glory of the English language, on his struggle to make ceramics in which to store his grain harvest:

“It would make the reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this paste; what odd, misshapen, ugly things I made; how many of them fell in, and how many fell out, the clay not being stiff enough to bear its own weight; how many cracked by the overviolent heat of the sun, being set out too hastily; and how many fell in pieces with only removing as well before as after they were dried; and, in a word, how, after having laboured hard to find the clay, to dig it, to temper it, to bring it home and work it, I could not make above two large earthen ugly things- I cannot call them jars- in about two months' labour. “

Are those magnificent sentences er whut? I guarantee you Robinson Crusoe didn’t know a participle from a conundrum, but he got the idea across.

Yer Humble and Obedient Servant,

TTB

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