What Do Commas and Football Coaches Have in Common?

I love the oxford comma. It grounds me and gives me focus. I love the oxford comma because it adds structure to my world. I love it because it is reliable. But mostly, I love the oxford comma because I had a kick-ass football coach in high school who taught me how to use it.

You know about the oxford comma right? It's the comma that precedes the conjunction before the final item in a list of three or more items. It's also the subject of much debate in grammar circles, some of which has been funnier than others. I've used it for years, and don't planning on giving up this habit any time soon.

I'm sure some of you may wonder why a football coach would choose to teach his team how to use the oxford comma. The truth is that he didn't. I never played football in high school. In fact, I didn't play any sports in high school at all. I was a band geek in high school; a really big one. Nonetheless, I had Coach White as a teacher. Besides coaching the JV football team, Coach White used to also teach English Composition. This impressed me, since I had never met a football coach before that taught anything other than Physical Education and Driver's Education!

Coach White was really passionate about comma rules. On the first day of the comma unit, he asked the class, "When do you use a comma?"

One of my unsuspecting classmates raised his hand to answer. "You use a comma when there's a pause in the sentence" he answered.


Pause in Sentence = Comma, right?

Coach White, or "Whitey" as everyone called him (yes, I realize how bad of a nickname that was, but alas, it was a different time) went to the board and wrote down the student's answer. He turned to face the class, and asked us if that was correct. We all nodded our heads in agreement.

Whitey immediately started jumping up and down, shouting, "NO! NO! NO! You do NOT put a comma where there's a pause in the sentence!"

Whitey explained to us that there were many rules that governed when a comma is supposed to be used, and that we were going to learn them all. He handed each of us a sheet that contained a list of comma rules. Actually, he handed each of us three copies. He told us to leave one in our binders, leave one at home, and put the third one somewhere we would look at it often; in our lockers, on the fridge, even laminated and taped to the wall of our showers. Whitey made it abundantly clear: we were going to learn these comma rules whether we like it or not.

Coach White must have done something write, because sixteen years later, I still remember why you should use a comma after an introductory adverbial clause, or to set off a parenthetical phrase (I do sometimes have problems remembering whether or not to use a comma before certain coordinating conjunctions, but the rules vary, and nobody is perfect).

....which brings me to my beloved oxford comma.

I suppose that I enjoy using the oxford comma, because it acts like a breadcrumb trail for the reader. When you see that last comma in a serial list, you know that you are supposed to pause here, here, and here! It also smacks of rebellion against Coach White's sacrosanct comma rules, because when applied to prose, the oxford comma actually does go where there's a pause in the sentence (in a justifiable way, of course)! This defiant use of the oxford comma gives me a degree of personal satisfaction, but it could also set me down a the path toward one of my pet peeves: writing down words as they sound (or to put it another way, spelling words aurally. But not orally -- that's Freudian).

I used to get emails from a co-worker who frequently used the contraction "should've" in his everyday speech. Naturally, he wrote his emails the way he talked, but since he was a notorious aural speller, he would always write out "should of." As in, "I already sent you that report. You should of gotten it yesterday."

Granted, "should of" does actually sounds remarkably close to its second-cousin of a contraction, "should've," but that doesn't excuse him from the shame of encouraging this kind of miscommunication. Had my colleague decided to spell out the words that are used in this phrase, he would have written out "should have" in the past participle verb tense. I learned to live with this peculiar email habit of his, because I couldn't figure out how to point it out to him without calling him an idiot to his face (after all, he "should have" known better, right?).

After I switched jobs, I rarely thought about my old colleague's past participle deficiency. However, last month, I saw it again. The dreaded "should of" popped up in an email! A completely different co-worker at a different company also had this grammatical affliction. I came to the conclusion that this situation is a tinderbox waiting to blow. Something has to be done!

Life is too short for this kind of stress, so in the interest of my health and longevity, I've decided to issue this blanket plea: if you have no idea how to use irregular verbs in the past participle tense, please learn. For my sake. It will have an enormous effect on my health and longevity.

That is, until some schmuck says "for all intensive purposes" to me again (but that's a topic for another post).

I hope you have enjoyed this post (ßSee? Past participle! Yahtzee!)

Have a good weekend everyone!
-Lee