Not an especially timely post, but may I start a grim year on a complimentary note and offer quick and heartfelt kudos to Erik Jensen for his recently published piece in The Green Bag, titled A Comment on Justice Thomas’s Commas. It’s a pleasant and reassuring sanity check to see that someone else is noticing the same thing you are and is similarly distracted by it. He aptly describes Thomas’s “punctuation problem” as follows:
Justice Thomas begins a lot of sentences with “And” or “But.”…[B]eginning sentences with “and” or “but” isn’t a problem. What is problematic about Justice Thomas’s usage, however, is that he routinely puts a comma after the introductory conjunction.
When Jensen writes “routinely,” he ain’t kidding. Thomas does this a lot. As Jensen writes, putting a comma after an introductory conjunction can be justified in particular circumstances–namely, “if a parenthetical phrase (even if no parentheses are used) follows the introductory conjunction.” He adds, “And, by the way, a comma after ‘and’ works here–as long as a comma also follows the parenthetical.” What Thomas is doing on a regular basis is not that. It’s, just odd.
Jensen cites chapter and verse about the practice as a grammatical matter. I believe he is quite right that Thomas is quite wrong. Just as important, it is ugly and unnecessary, both visually and as a record of how the same words might be spoken, even to oneself. As Jensen notes, quoting Morton Freeman’s book The Grammatical Lawyer, the very point of using “But” and “And” to open a sentence is to provide emphasis and immediacy and omit “cumbrous formal connectives.” Adding a comma slows the proceedings for no reason. “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” to take an example given by Freeman, is an unimprovable sentence; “And, the evening and the morning were the first day” is merely an unforgivable one.
And as a set of instructions for reading aloud, it directs the speaker to insert a pause that is both unnatural and destructive of the admirable effect of the blunt opening. The Thomasian comma after “But” or “And” is the equivalent of tossing a cup of Proust into the middle of a spoonful of Hemingway, or following a bracing trumpet fanfare with a six-minute rest at the opening of a marching song. It is, as the old ad slogan goes, the pause that perplexes.
It’s a nice piece, entirely correct, and a perfectly sized issue for a justice in search of a manageable New Year’s resolution. From Jensen’s mouth, one may hope, to God’s law clerks’ ears.