I love this. Ben Yagoda wrote “Fanfare for the Comma Man” for The Times earlier this week:
If you’re writing for publication, something else that comes into play is house style. This is seen most famously in the so-called Oxford comma — the one that goes after the second-to-last item in a series. Referring to the Philadelphia Phillies outfield as “Pence, Victorino and a left fielder-by-committee” would be fine in this newspaper but not in The New Yorker, which would change it to “Pence, Victorino, and a left fielder-by-committee.”
The New Yorker has always been scrupulous, bordering on fetishistic, about commas, in large part because of its founder Harold Ross’s mania for precision and clarity. E.B. White, who was subject to the magazine’s editing for more than five decades, remarked in a Paris Review interview, “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” There are many examples, but one particular comma use is consistently and pretty much only found in The New Yorker.
(That E.B. White anecdote has done a few rounds of the internetosphere by now, but I always really like it.) Which drew a response from “the keeper of the comma shaker” at The New Yorker:
Everyone knows that The New Yorker is famously fuddy-duddy for its use of “close” punctuation. The copy editor from whom I inherited the comma shaker was herself not a fan of our style on commas; hence her painstaking creation of this one-of-a-kind item—a cannister (we spell it with two “n”s) about the size of a giant can of grated cheese, wrapped in brown paper flecked with hand-drawn commas, and topped with a perforated blue lid. The joke, of course, is that we are overliberal in our use of commas and ought to be more judicious.
I didn’t find this especially interesting, but it’s about copy-editing, so I thought you might :)
