New Yorker commas and James Thurber’s The Years With Ross (1958)
James Thurber on editor Harold Ross’s “clarification complex” and obsession with commas:
The New Yorker’s overuse of commas, originating in Ross’s clarification complex, has become notorious the world over among literary people. In Paris, in 1955, an English journalist said to me one night, “The biography of Ross should be called The Century of the Comma Man.” A professor of English somewhere in England wrote me ten years ago a long, itemized complaint about the New Yorker comma….He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: “After dinner, the men when into the living room,” and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all right. I wrote back this particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
Thurber goes on to recall a fight over whether “the red, white and blue” should be punctuated:
I suggested, and still think I was right, that the style should be “the red white and blue” and I told Ross that. “All those commas make the flag seemed rained on. They give it a furled look,” I said. “Leave them out, and Old Glory is flung to the breeze, as it should be.”
Finally, he admits that it took 10 years for him to come up with the comeback, “This magazine is in a commatose condition.”
Image via literarious.com
Didn't Thurber also say that Ross insisted on the comma in the following sentence, for fear that otherwise people might misconstrue the fourth word?: "He saw her, but a moment."
(Btw, I assume that "After dinner, the men when" should be "...went".)
