Comma Ergo Sum
[Dave Zimmerman is out of town at an insecure undisclosed location, but he e-mailed us this post.]
There's a genre of literature designed especially for those two- to three-minute periods when you find yourself sitting around with nothing to do--for example (and I'm speaking euphemistically here), when you're "waiting in line to check out" or "waiting on a friend to drop by." IVP Books has one such book, The Original Dr. Steve's Almanac of Christian Trivia: A Miscellany of Oddities, Instructional Anecdotes, Little-Known Facts and Occasional Frivolity. Lately my brief-read book of choice has been Sit & Solve Logic Puzzles.
It turns out I'm not half-bad at logic puzzles; I've only failed two so far. My latest failure, however, I'm ashamed to admit, has to do with my command of grammar. The challenge was to figure out in what order a woman read five authors, and how many titles by each she read. The clue that threw me was as follows: "Ursula Le Guin is the third author that Miranda read after completing five books by another author."
I promptly wrote Ursula's name in the "third author" box and the number five in the "second author" box. What I failed to note was that the phrase "after completing five books . . ." was not preceded by a comma, which made it a restrictive (rather than nonrestrictive) appositive. Or something like that. It turned out that Ursula was the fifth author--three authors after the author of five books. My logic failed me because my grammar failed me.
I've had worse potential consequences for bad editing. Once upon a time my boss came up to me, dropped a newspaper on the table in front of me and said, "Find the error or you're fired." Fortunately the error, in 64-point type, was easy to spot--the Church of England was printed as the "Chruch of England." Needless to say, I'm still employed.
I still have reasonable confidence in my rational faculties too. Two out of three logic puzzles wrong ain't bad, right? And it's good to know that good grammar plays a critical role in good logic, I suppose. That makes editors something akin to philosopher kings in my book. But my professional confidence was shaken nonetheless: the unacknowledged absence of a simple comma sent me down a path into logical confusion. That doesn't make me a bad editor, does it?
Posted by Al Hsu
at August 22, 2007 11:49 AM
Comments are closed for this entry.