Hunter and Gatherer

May. 23, 2012 at 8:41pm

Happy birthday @AbbyTDriscoll (Taken with Instagram at Charlie’s Kitchen)

May. 22, 2012 at 9:27am

How improper comma usage screwed up the 2nd amendment

Commas! Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are necessary to thoughtfully constructed prose. The NY Times Opinionator has two recent articles about modern comma usage. In one of them, Ben Yagoda discusses the “codification” of comma usage rules that occurred over the course of the 19th century.

You can glimpse a reason for this codification — which emphasized consistency rather than sound — by looking at the opening of the Second Amendment of the Constitution (1789):

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There are three commas. The one after “state” would be used today; the one after “arms” would not; the one after “militia” is ambiguous; and all three have caused a world of hurt, confusion and argumentation over the last 223 years. As Adam Freedman wrote in this newspaper in 2007, a Federal District Court ruling invalidating the District of Columbia’s gun ban (subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court) held that “the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one ‘prefatory’ and the other ‘operative.’ On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about ‘the right of the people … shall not be infringed.’” More generally, the funky comma protocol muddies the crucial link between the importance of militias and the right of people to bear arms.

So, there you have it. Perhaps if the founding fathers had been stricter about comma usage we wouldn’t be constantly fighting over the interpretation of this edict.

May. 20, 2012 at 11:15am