The COMMA

Commas and Space

    I thought I would consider less contentious subjects, but before doing so I will make a quick stop at the comma, about which people argue a fair bit. A while back I read Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris. It is, by the way, a good and funny book. In it I noticed this sentence: “The editors of Webster’s Third saved eighty pages by cutting down on commas.”(p.94). She is referring to the very large dictionary, but still eighty pages seems like a lot of space saved.

    I tracked her reference to this source, where I found the sentence that follows: The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, by David Skinner:

“Errors aside, Macdonald’s review was compelling, and it helpfully illuminated the dictionary’s production with neat reportorial findings, such as that Gove claimed to have saved eighty pages by minimizing the use of commas…”

  I know what you are thinking: “There’s a book about a dictionary”? Yes there is and you could also have a look at this one: The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics.

    The review referred to is by Dwight Macdonald so I looked in it for the eighty missing pages. And, alas: “At first glance, 3’s [Webster’s Third] typography is cleaner and more harmonious. Dr. Gove estimates that the editors eliminated two million commas and periods (as after adj., n., and v.), or eighty pages’ worth.” (see: “Books: The String Untuned,” by Dwight Macdonald, The New Yorker, March 10, 1962).

That was initially satisfying, but one soon notices that a few periods were thrown in with the commas and the original source seems to be Dr. Gove. Apparently the answer may be found in Gove’s papers which are likely in the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. My blogging budget does not allow for a trip there during this fiscal year, but maybe later.

Extremely Long Paragraphs

    Since you also are likely dissatisfied by my unsuccessful search and the rather abrupt ending, I will offer a few other interesting metrics supplied by Mr. Macdonald in the very long review of Webster’s Third. While he thought at first that the “typography is cleaner” in Webster’s Third, he soon noticed that the various definitions of a word were all placed in a single paragraph without any breaks. This led to very long superparagraphs and he offers examples. I will leave it to you to investigate further.

9’ of Paragraphs

“The most extreme example I found was 3’s entry on the transitive verb take, which runs on for a single paragraph two feet eight inches long, in which the twenty-one main meanings are divided only by bold faced numerals; there follow, still in the same paragraph, four inches of the intransitive take, the only sign of this gear-shifting being a tiny printer’s squiggle.”

“Take is, admittedly, quite a verb. The Oxford English Dictionary gives sixty-three meanings in nine feet, but they are spaced out in separate paragraphs…”