The wretched comma

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Is that a tall, dark, and handsome man standing over there? Or a tall, dark and handsome man? Both uses of the comma are correct, but the British Department for Education apparently doesn’t realise it and wrongly penalises children in exams for using the “Oxford comma”. Any child writing “tall, dark, and handsome” is thus marked incorrect.

The debate over whether to put a comma before the “and” in a list has been around since the 18th century. In the 19th century publishing houses decided to decide on the matter, but made different decisions.

Oxford University Press decided it should be in, and in such cases it is now called the Oxford, or serial, comma. They reasoned that each adjective before the noun was of equal importance, so should all have a comma. Cambridge University Press, however, decided it should be left out. Both examples of usage are correct. (Adapted from The Guardian, May 2016, reporting on comments made by David Crystal, a linguistics expert).

Please excuse a plug for my new book of rhymed verse, called “The Rueful Hippopotamus” (Available on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk). In it I include my own take on the use of commas:

The Comma.

I’d like to take a bomber
And obliterate the comma,
Whose phrase attenuation
Is the bane of punctuation.
I always use too many;
In my prose they’re ten a penny;
While lawyers, rather direly,
Have abolished them entirely.

A comma alters, meaning
Is the goal to which I’m leaning.
The comma’s like a word or tense –
Change it and you change the sense.
Omit it and you must work out
What the prose is all about.

But I am truly disconcerted
When the comma is inverted.
Use the single or the double?
Bound to get you into trouble.
To place quote marks within quotations
Can cause a war between two nations.
It’s all a little much for me.

And so I’ll let the reader pout
And grimace, and just sort it out.

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Tipping

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Restaurants should hand all tips – and money accrued from service charges – to staff, the U.K Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills recently decided. Sajid Javid wants to prevent firms from taking any share of tips; and for restaurants to make it clearer to customers that service charges are optional. The proposals would initially be voluntary, but Javid said the Government would consider legislation “if necessary”. The Government was responding to complaints that restaurants were helping themselves to some of the service charge. Separately, it was reported that Le Pain Quotidien – which has for years been creaming off staff tips – and other chains are now cutting other staff perks to cover the cost of paying the National Living Wage. (The Week)

I absolutely agree. Tipping used to reflect the level of service. When I went to live in the United States the tipping percentage was 15%; now it’s close to the 20% expected in New York. Heaven help you if you walk out giving nothing. Tipping is regarded, not as an expression of pleasure at a good meal well served, but as an unavoidable cost. So why not simply put the prices up amd give the waiting staff a predictable income?

At least waiters converse with you (“My name is Joe and I will be your server tonite”), whereas taxi drivers mostly sit there grimly, expecting to be tipped for doing their job. If the driver drives too fast or talks incessantly on the phone during the trip I say to him, “I would give you a tip, but you drive far too fast and at times dangerously. You’re lucky I don’t report you”. “If you insist on chattering on the phone all the time you can’t expect a tip”. It’s surprising. They usually apologise. They know they are in the wrong, but few take them to task, so second nature is tipping in America. In any case, it’s illogical to tip taxi drivers and not policemen, mail deliverers, painters, plumbers and so on. Why taxi drivers?

Asking strangers for money

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Yesterday I received an email from a new crowd funding platform called “CoverrMe.com” that helps readers in need raise cash from total strangers for mortgages, medical bills, vet bills, debt, etc. This isn’t new. Some while ago musician Kanye West appealed to his Twitter audience for cash donations, saying he was $53m.in debt. This tendency to ask for money from strangers seems to be quite a phenomenon. Regularly, people write in to the Washington Post and say they have been invited to a wedding and the bride has asked them just to send money – no presents required. One British couple told a guest to their wedding that the £100 she had sent as a present was insufficient, adding, “If you wanted to send any adjustment it would be thankfully received”.  

There are several correct, perfectly understandable ways of dealing with people like this.  One is on no account to attend the wedding and to write off any money sent as a sunk cost or a learning experience.  Secondly, erase the name, address, telephone number snd Facebook details of the couple and go and find a couple of civilised, well brought-up friends instead.  The third way to deal with it is to reply to the above letter, as follows: “Dear X, I received your demand for more money. I would point out that is costing X dollars in airfares to get to your event. Your remittance towards the cost would be thankfully received”.

The first and second options are the most Epicurean ones, being the least aggressive and stressful.

The baby boomers are not to blame?

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“Americans were once modest and self-sacrificing, but then the 1960s came and the nation turned into a bunch of entitled narcissists. That’s the “conventional story, beloved especially on the Right”, says David Brooks, a commentator with the New York Times and a talking head on public television. Yet the facts don’t match the narrative, he says. Although a cultural shift of this sort did take place, it “didn’t happen around the time of Woodstock and the Age of Aquarius. It happened in the late 1940s and it was the members of the Greatest Generation that led the shift.” The pivot point was the end of the War, when Americans, after years of austerity, embraced consumerism. This led to a “softening of the moral sphere”. In 1946, Rabbi Joshua Liebman published a book called Peace of Mind that contained a new set of commandments, including “thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses”, and “thou shalt love thyself”. Over the next few years, several other bestsellers urged readers to embrace self-affirmation. This cultural shift was welcome in many ways: until then, too many people had been taught to think badly of themselves. But those who believe we’ve “overshot the mark” and become too self-obsessed should remember: it wasn’t under the baby boomers that the rot set in, it was under the baby boomers’ parents.” (David Brooks, The New York Times)

This large group of people, born after the Second World War, are now retiring. A proportion of them having coincidentally, while in power, presided over a catastrophe for the economy, growth in the cult of endless war, the export of democracy to unready cultures, globalisation, the hollowing out of the middle classes, unlimited money in politics and a yawning gap between Right and Left. It is of course unfair to blame a whole generation rather than just an entitled, self-congratulatory clique. By the same token they are collectively guilty of failing to take responsibility for the actions of the people they put into power. There are many who are weary of the boomers, and it may be for the best that they are retiring. Collectively they may think the current state of the nation is a coincidence. Others don’t.

I feel lucky to have experienced the generation that survived the Depression and World War – they understood humility, and had a lot of grit and common sense.

Death by doctor

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“A couple of years ago, my son had to undergo surgery for a hernia. He was rolled into the operation room and I was waiting nervously outside.

“After some time, the surgeon poked his head out of the operation room and asked me, “Is the hernia on the right or on the left side?’”

“Surgical horror stories where patients receive the wrong operation or have the wrong limb removed are not just urban legends. Through MAP’s support, Palestine is set to become a pioneer of surgical safety best practice in the Middle East”. (from the Medical Aid to Palestinians website).

Right procedures for the wrong body or part of body are par for the course, not just in Palestine, but all over the world. The nasty truth, suppressed by doctors everywhere, is that hospital mistakes are common and very frequently fatal. In the last week we have been told that medical error is the second most common cause of death in hospitals. One can sympathize with doctors who are over-worked, tired, and having to concentrate intensely during procedures, especially those sensitive ones concerned, for instance, with the heart or brain. But some of the problem has to be sheer carelessness. Up there with straightforward mistakes and errors of judgment is the seeming inability of the medical profession to reduce hospital infections that kill and lead to readmissions.

All in all, I am personally hoping never to see the inside of a hospital ever again, and, if I am wheeled to one protesting, I now know to ask lots of questions, be a pain in the neck, refuse to be turfed out after 24 hours, be very dubious about pain killers and make sure the surgeon is going to operate on the right part of my anatomy. I advise everyone to emulate me.