Where did all the commas go, long time passing? Where did all the commas go-o, long time ago? Where did all the commas go? Gone to hyphens every one. When will they ever learn; when will they e-e-ver learn?
Elaine Schmitz wrote that for our critique group after I sent them this quote from the Eats, Shoots & Leaves calendar:
A reader from a couple of hundred years ago would be shocked by present-day punctuation that we now regard as flawless and elegant. Why don’t we use capital letters for all nouns any more? Why don’t we use full stops after everyday abbreviations? Why not combine colons with dashes sometimes? Where did all the commas go?
As we struggle with deadlines, inner critics, and characters that will insist on creating lives of their own, we should take comfort in the knowledge that language and writing change. Today’s style police will be tomorrow’s outlaws. Someday, the much-maligned adverb may even be seen in polite society again.
I must credit Peter, Paul, and Mary as my inspiration. I bought their greatest hits last month trying to keep Border’s afloat. Since then I’ve been serenaded back to my youth with Lemon Tree, The Cruel War, Too Much of Nothing, and the Wedding Song, which became my wedding song, too. As far as commas go, I’m still partial to them, and to adverbs and gerunds, too. But then I groove to P,P, and M.
Morning edits of a short-story memoir from long ago pushed me to delete semicolons–once required, now cremated and scattered to the winds–for favored dashes. If my story isn’t published soon, will a new wave of punctuation masters demand a resurrection?