Eleanor Tatum

Last week eleanortatum.com posted her (mine) first Strunkianism. The next will be soon, but the commanding-for-attention Comma, that tiny worm-like pill bug, has caused yet another dinner party discussion to become interestingly heated. After summarizing Gray Lace and this blog, to the table of eight, the gentleman to my right defended Commas everywhere, except in front of “and” in a list of three or more. The guest to my right insisted Commas are dinosaurs who stupidly had survived the ice age.

Trying to include everyone in the discussion, as my mother taught, I introduced Trevor and Catherine, as my heroes in Gray Lace, and their adventures in “parenthetictism”. William Strunk, Jr. defined parenthetic as an interruption to the flow of a sentence. He allowed the writer powers to decide when and where, as witnessed above with my pill bugs. He even released writers to create howevers and therefores around said pill bugs at their digression. Such powers are above and beyond the three branches of government!

“But whether the interruption is slight or considerable, he must never omit one comma and leave the other. There is no defense for such punctuation.”  Example: Trevor’s nationality, British attracted many Bostonian debutants.    Ahhh…no defense indeed! I’ll forgive Professor Strunk for assuming all writers are male and warn you, my adorable readers, that next time I’ll tackle the elusive nonrestrictive relative clause. Relatives, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Enough!