What’s a comma worth? Apparently, in extreme cases, $2.13 million:
A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal’s cancellation.
The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.
Now to convince my students…
via Tidbits
23 comments
June 2, 2009 at 2:00 pm
bitchphd
That’s really quite awesome.
June 2, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Jason B.
This goes into my lesson plan for tomorrow morning.
June 2, 2009 at 4:39 pm
jazzbumpa
Joe: I don’t got none of them commas.
Bill: Where’s your grammar?
Joe: Home bakin’ cookies. Why’d'y’a ask?
June 2, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Charlieford
Wow. That’s like the Van Gogh of commas. It strikes me that a comma that expensive will attract thieves, so if I owned it, I’d either donate it to a museum or get a really good security system. Then there’s the counterfeiters: People making imitations of the Maritimes’ comma and selling them on the black market. Will there be a market for experts who are trained to detect forged punctuation marks? Is that like a career?
June 2, 2009 at 8:04 pm
silbey
,
June 2, 2009 at 8:10 pm
kid bitzer
hey, wait a second silbey.
that’s no comma: that’s an impostrophe!
June 2, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Michael Turner
Wait, weren’t a lot of these now-toxic goodies like Collateralized Debt Obligations written as contracts? Did anybody take out Comma Insurance on them? What if they didn’t? Worse: what if they did, but the insurer was AIG?
Forget 2 million dollar commas — we could see a 2 trillion dollar comma any day now!
June 2, 2009 at 9:27 pm
kid bitzer
after all, the difference between 2,000,000 and 2,000,000,000,000 is pretty much just a coupla commas.
i mean, other than that, there are zero differences.
June 2, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Michael Turner
You’re right kb, I’m sweating over nothing, nada, zilch. Zimbabwe’s got this. (Note the lack of commas; they take no unnecessary risks, a commendable virtue in any central bank these days.)
June 2, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Vance
From the article:
the claim being that the “unless and until …” clause was meant to apply only to the renewal, but by the insertion of the comma, arguably applied to the initial five-year term as well.
In a world I once inhabited, there are commas that are measurable extents.
June 3, 2009 at 12:01 am
megancase
Even without the comma, I read the contract as being cancellable with one-year notice at any time. Thems just some unclear writing, right there!
June 3, 2009 at 12:07 am
Michael Turner
arguably
Ever notice? If you say “arguably” over and over, fast, pretty soon you’re saying “garble”. Or “gobble-gobble-gobble” Or “argle bargle”.
Or, as I prefer, after a high semi-colonic: “Argle; bargle.”
This is what lawyers really talk about, during those long meetings you’re paying for, whenever you buy something from any company that’s had its ass sued off.
(“But why do lawyers suddenly start talking about that, right when I buy those products?” you ask, indicating parentheses with an untranscribable sotto voce. Because, arguably, they boggled the bargling logbook somethin’ ‘orrible, that’s why.)
June 3, 2009 at 12:27 am
Vance
Yeah, having thought this over, like Megan, I would think it would take a clever argument to keep the termination clause from applying to the first term of five years, comma or no comma. And while this is arguably a matter of grammar, the lesson I would draw is that writers should beware of hanging such a heavy semantic weight on such a thin reed of inaudible syntax.
June 3, 2009 at 12:52 am
dave
Shoulda used a semi-colon….
June 3, 2009 at 2:31 am
ajay
AFAIK one of the first tests of the Polaris missile saw it rising from the sea, turning hard left, flying in a tightening horizontal spiral and crashing back into the sea again. Because a comma had been left out of the code.
June 3, 2009 at 6:18 am
kid bitzer
that just shows that there are many coordinate systems and polar, is one of them.
June 3, 2009 at 7:44 am
Michael Turner
Ajay, you might be have fallen victim to yet another urban-legend embellisment/distortion of the story of the first flyby probe to Venus. It was not a comma, but a hyphen or maybe an overbar in some formula — I couldn’t get to the bottom of it when I was trying to fix this Wikipedia article. The launcher was intentionally destroyed when it veered off course.
IIRC, I gave up trying to pin down the exact cause when I discovered that the most reliable source had cited some (unfindable) videotaped interviews, recorded decades after the fact, with people who had not been directly involved in causing or diagnosing the error.
(Yes, this is how I spend my time when I’m not preparing for the next meeting of that MLA committee charged with deciding whether or not “anal retentive” should be spelled with a hyphen.)
June 3, 2009 at 7:45 am
Michael Turner
“might be have fallen” -> “might have fallen”
I have definitely fallen on my sword, and will not longer be going to those MLA committee meetings, after this disgrace.
June 4, 2009 at 3:01 am
ajay
Michael: I’m ready to believe that the cause is an urban legend, but I’ve seen a picture of the failed launch, and it was definitely a SLBM launch – so either Polaris or Trident.
June 4, 2009 at 3:27 am
Michael Turner
Possibly test flight 7 in the Trident II program. The photo matches your description. There’s video that might be of the same incident. None of the root causes mentioned related to punctuation marks though.
I’d write more but I have to go clean some pocket protectors now.
June 4, 2009 at 4:47 am
kid bitzer
“I’m ready to believe that the cause is an urban legend”
sure; urban legends have caused far worse things than that.
June 4, 2009 at 6:35 am
dave
They are widely responsible for encouraging conservative voting-patterns, after all….
June 11, 2009 at 9:14 am
Lavonne Southall
Putting commas in the wrong place either, behind or in front of a word or number, can cause confusion or a disaster.