A useful guideline: the comma is likely if it’s a comfortable substitute for and. To get technical, we’re talking here about coordinate adjectives. How silly would it be to write a shiny, thing? I reject a comma because shiny applies to antique Rolls as if that phrase were a single word.

It’s a subtle distinction: Are both adjectives equally focused on the noun (he’s an honest man and a hard-working man), or does the first adjective describe a cohesive adjective-noun unit ( antique Rolls).

Here’s one I do buy: an honest, hard-working man. Trouble is, you don’t always want a comma in a two-adjectives-plus-noun construction. Lately I’ve noticed a tendency in newspapers and magazines to reflexively inject a comma when a noun is described by two adjectives-something we do in English all the time. Question marks seem easy, but let me ask if you think the one at the end of this sentence is correct? Because it’s not.īut today I want to home in on the comma. Parentheses confuse a lot of people (do periods go inside or outside?). Hyphens have become a mind-numbing mystery, rarely used where they’re needed-and often wrongly placed where a long dash should be. I’m no fan of McDonald’s, but at least the company wears its apostrophe proudly (unlike apostates such as Walgreens). Apostrophes are increasingly misused or ignored. Many abuse them few can even explain how they differ from colons. Periods can present problems, but they’re fairly low-maintenance, because most people know when to stop. It’s as if chefs got careless about seasoning. I’m not sure whether this is the writers’ or the readers’ fault, but I mostly blame the writers. (In a recent survey, it was in a dead heat with stovepipes, just behind pocket lint.) I realize that on the grand scale of interesting things, punctuation is pretty far down the list.

The division 2 chameleon