Grammar: Gaffes vs. Crimes

Further — but more briefly! — re that commas-and-false-modification post. Reading the great essayist Zadie Smith in “The New Yorker,” on the brilliant comedy duo Key and Peele, I find this: “Key’s father married his stepmother.”

Unlike what I was talking about in my blog post — “proper” grammar perverted to inauthentic purposes — that’s an innocent gaffe. The pronoun “his” can’t have “Key” as its antecedent, as here “Key” is part of the possessive “Key’s,” not a noun but an adjective, which can’t serve as the antecedent to a pronoun; meanwhile, a perfectly good-looking noun is kicking around, near the pronoun, eager to offer itself as the antecedent, but that’s not the intended meaning. I don’t think Smith is saying, in this case, that some guy married his own stepmother.

This error doesn’t reflect a crime against honesty; it’s just a slip. I raise it because in writing that post, I’ve realized that grammar rules aren’t my subject. (If this kind of error were all over any magazine, the magazine would become unreadable, but that’s not the case.) We all make slips. Funny, given my Freudian bent, but in this case I don’t think the slip is all that revealing (despite the Oedipal drama it seems to point to!). A bogus intention elaborately hidden within structurally flawless grammar — that’s where I think the more interesting conflicts are revealed.

Resisting the Felicitous and the Deft: Sentences, Punctuation, and Meaning

There’s an entertaining and intelligent article in a recent New Yorker about the uses and abuses of punctuation, among other things. The piece, written by a veteran copyeditor at the magazine, will be as dull as dishwater to many, and fascinating to those like me, who work on how to make sentences say what we mean.

Really say what we really mean. Not seem to say what we more or less mean.

As the New Yorker piece suggests, that task poses endless difficulties. But the piece also exposes what I see as important failures in the tactics we use to make sentences say what writers mean.

* * * *

The author, Mary Norris, defends what she calls “close” editing for punctuation and other aspects of sentence construction. Here’s one of her examples:

“Before Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret.”

Norris and The New Yorker favor placing those commas after “died” and “cancer” over this cleaner and more common approach: “Before Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991, he expressed regret.”

The example comes up because the writer Ben Yagoda called The New Yorker‘s reasons for putting commas after “died” and “cancer” nutty, and at first glance Yagoda seems sound. He ascribes the magazine’s insistence on the extra commas to a hysterical concern that otherwise “the sentence would suggest that Atwater died multiple times and of multiple causes.”

But that’s not quite the rationale. It would be nutty indeed to fear that without those commas, a reader couldn’t gather that Atwater didn’t also die before or after 1991, and didn’t die of causes other than brain cancer.

We read sentences like it all the time, but the sad fact is that, regardless of how you punctuate it, “Before Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991, he expressed regret” is a foolish thing to write, and not noticing the foolishness causes problems that run deeper than incorrectness in grammar and usage.