海角大神

In 鈥淏etween You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,鈥� Mary Norris has written the kind of book that you can pick up and start paging through and then suddenly realize you鈥檝e read practically the whole thing without even trying.

It鈥檚 a three-fer: an entertaining memoir, a lighthearted but truly useful book on grammar and style, and a behind-the-scenes look at the workings of one of America鈥檚 great literary institutions, The New Yorker. It is especially about the punctuation of this great institution. Ms. Norris comes by her subtitle honestly: She has spent more than three decades in the copy department of the magazine.

Her title suggests conversational intimacy but gently reminds people that 鈥渕e鈥� is a perfectly fine word, better than 鈥淚,鈥� even, as the object of a preposition. She implicitly warns her readers not to panic under pressure and say things like 鈥渂etween you and I.鈥�

And what about the comma? We use it all the time, but it has a dual life. It is used partly to indicate sentence structure, as after an introductory infinitive phrase, for instance: 鈥淭o see better, he moved toward the window.鈥� But it鈥檚 also a sort of stage direction, indicating pauses.聽

Norris describes the two approaches as 鈥渙pen鈥� or 鈥渃lose鈥� style. 鈥淥pen鈥� style is stingier with the commas and lets readers figure out for themselves things that a 鈥渃lose鈥� style clarifies with commas. 鈥淥pen鈥� style arguably reads faster 鈥� except when it doesn鈥檛, because you have to read a sentence three times to make sense of it because it doesn鈥檛 have enough punctuation.

The New Yorker uses a lot of commas. One of Norris鈥檚 colleagues made fun of the house style by keeping a 鈥渃omma shaker鈥� on her desk, to shake commas onto page proofs the way people shake red pepper flakes onto pizza.

Journalism professor Ben Yagoda, who has written a whole book about The New Yorker, about a sentence from an article it ran about the late Republican political operative Lee Atwater: 鈥淏efore Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret....鈥� Mr. Yagoda pronounced the magazine 鈥渘utty鈥� for the commas after 鈥渃ancer鈥� and 鈥�1991.鈥� Ah, but the argument for them is they set off what鈥檚 not essential and make the bones of the sentence easier to see: 鈥淏efore Atwater died, he expressed regret.鈥�

Fear not, Norris takes superfluous commas seriously, too. When she discovered one in a sentence (鈥淓ve was across the room in a thin, burgundy dress that showed the faint outline of her stomach鈥�) by a writer she much admires, she ended up writing to him about it. He wrote back, and although he didn鈥檛 agree that that particular comma was redundant, he knew exactly which one, of all the commas in the book, she meant.聽

Dear Reader, you will actually learn from this witty memoir cum grammar-and-style seminar 鈥� I certainly did 鈥� but the process is so gentle that you may think you are merely having fun.