Hanged by a comma

0:00 “Hunters: please use caution when hunting pedestrians using walk trails.” “Oh!

0:06 Boy syrup” “Made “fresh” in store” A misplaced

0:12 or absent punctuation mark can lead to hilarity.

0:16 But at its worst it can cost you millions.

0:20 Or it can even cost you your life.

0:23 So let’s explore some of the worst uses and misuses of punctuation from history.

0:28 Welcome to another RobWords.

0:32 This is the state funeral in Ireland of Sir Roger Casement in 1965.

0:38 However, by this point, the hero of the Irish nationalist movement

0:43 had already been dead for almost 50 years.

0:46 In the meantime, his remains had been languishing in the grounds

0:49 of a prison in London where half a century earlier,

0:53 he’d been executed for treason.

0:55 The story of Roger Casement’s death is the right

0:58 place to begin a video about the power of punctuation,

1:02 because he has gone down in history as the man who was “hanged by a comma”.

1:07 Casement’s trial in 1916– in the thick of the First

1:11 World War– was big news either side of the Irish Sea.

1:15 Sir Roger had been arrested by the Royal Irish Constabulary after travelling

1:19 by German U-boat to Ireland and was taken to the Tower of London.

1:24 Remember: Ireland hadn’t yet achieved independence from Britain at this point.

1:29 He stood accused of trying to recruit Irish

1:31 prisoners of war in Germany to the independence

1:34 movement in Ireland and of procuring weapons

1:38 from the Germans to use against the British.

1:41 There was zero doubt that Sir Roger had done what he was accused of.

1:46 The playwright George Bernard Shaw– a fellow Irishman and fan

1:49 of the Republican– wrote supportive letters

1:51 to Casement as he was awaiting trial.

1:53 But later also wrote that “the facts were undeniable”.

1:58 Instead, his defence team was hoping to keep him

2:02 from the gallows by contesting a point of law.

2:06 This is where the fateful comma comes in.

2:09 Sir Roger was being tried under the 1351 Treason Act.

2:13 a piece of legislation that was already over half a millennium old,

2:18 and it said a treasonable offence was committed… “if a Man

2:21 do levy war against our Lord the King in his realm,

2:25 or be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm,

2:28 giving to them aid and comfort in the realm, or elsewhere…” Dot, dot, dot.

2:34 We can stop there, because there it is.

2:36 The comma upon which Casement’s life supposedly hung– right near the end,

2:42 just before “or elsewhere”.

2:44 The sentence– or rather, fragment of a sentence– is hideous, isn’t it?

2:48 It is ambiguous, and in such a way that makes

2:52 what Roger Casement did either treason or not treason.

2:56 His defence argued that this described two possible treasonable acts: One:

3:02 levying war against our Lord the King in his realm,

3:06 and two: adhering to the King’s enemies in his realm.

3:10 The bit about “giving to them aid and comfort in the realm

3:13 or elsewhere” was simply a clarification of what “adhering” meant:

3:18 helping the King’s enemies whether those enemies were in Britain or abroad.

3:23 Now, under this interpretation, for the act to be treason the traitor

3:28 had to be acting within the King’s realm, i.e.

3:33 on British soil.

3:34 However, Roger had done the acts he was accused of while in Germany.

3:40 Therefore: not treason.

3:42 It’d basically make him a prisoner of war or enemy agent rather than a traitor.

3:47 The prosecution, of course, had other ideas.

3:50 They argued that the “or elsewhere”, separated off by a comma,

3:55 in fact referred to where the “adhering to the King’s enemies” had taken place.

4:00 It was treason if the adherence had happened “in his realm… or elsewhere”.

4:07 It’s tough, but if you are lost, it’s not a big deal.

4:10 The point is: read the sentence one way and Sir Roger is not a traitor.

4:14 Read it another and he’s guilty as sin.

4:18 And the comma is a big part of the ambiguity.

4:22 Take it away and the defence has a stronger case.

4:25 Leave it in, and the law remains confusing.

4:29 So where’s the argument?

4:30 The comma is there.

4:31 We’re looking right at it, aren’t we?

4:34 Well, yes we are.

4:35 But just have a look at the other side of this document.

4:40 This is exactly the same text but in a different language.

4:43 How’s your French?

4:44 Well it doesn’t really matter because this is 14th century Anglo-Norman French,

4:49 which is rather different to the French spoken today.

4:52 Nevertheless, I’m confident that this is the equivalent bit

4:57 and do you notice anything about this bit of text?

5:01 No commas at all.

5:02 And definitely not before the “ou par aillours”, which means “or elsewhere”.

5:09 Does this matter?

5:10 Well, yeah.

5:11 Because this is the original version of the law.

5:14 The English translation comes later and might

5:17 not be an accurate interpretation of it.

5:20 Someone just decided to put those commas in.

5:23 In the end, the judge sided with the prosecution.

5:27 His activities, even though they were in Germany, were treason.

5:32 After being found guilty, Casement wrote:

5:34 “God deliver from such antiquaries as these, to hang a man’s

5:39 life upon a comma and throttle him with a semi-colon.” Dramatic.

5:44 Casement was stripped of his knighthood,

5:46 earned from the King just five years earlier for highlighting

5:49 atrocities against indigenous people in the Belgian Congo and Peru.

5:53 He was an impressive fella who despised colonialism in all forms.

5:57 And he was sentenced to death.

6:00 In the century since he was hanged,

6:02 the importance of the comma in his case has become somewhat inflated,

6:05 I think it’s fair to say.

6:06 Sir Roger was doomed as soon as he entered the dock,

6:10 with the British acting as both the victim and the judge,

6:14 jury and executioner in the case.

6:16 What’s more, the discovery of his diaries

6:19 at that time revealed that Sir Roger was gay.

6:23 A serious crime all of its own back then.

6:25 He died a martyr to the Irish cause and 50 years later,

6:29 his remains returned to Ireland and where he received that state funeral,

6:34 and is remembered as a hero of the Republican movement.

6:38 Next, we’re going to explore what happens when punctuation meets piracy.

6:44 But first, let’s see how many punctuation marks I can get into this next bit.

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6:57 you’re used to a bit of a catapostrophe.

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8:26 Now, in 1818, the US Supreme Court was faced with a quandry as it so often is.

8:33 In the case of United States v.

8:35 Palmer et al, it had to decide whether three men,

8:38 John Palmer, Thomas Wilson, and Barney Calloghan, were pirates.

8:44 “Shiver me timbers!” The Court set out the facts,

8:46 in typically impenetrable legal prose:

8:47 The three men “did piratically and feloniously set upon,

8:51 board, break, and enter a certain ship called

8:55 the Industria Rafaelli.” It was a Spanish ship.

8:58 They then “piratically and feloniously” did various other nasty things,

9:03 before making off with thousands of dollars worth of sugar,

9:07 rum, honey, hides, coffee, silver and gold.

9:11 Now, that sounds pretty piratey to me.

9:13 But was it in the eyes of US law?

9:16 That’s what the Supreme Court had to decide and it

9:20 mattered because piracy was a crime punishable by death.

9:24 But the law was so unclear that it prompted the judge to say:

9:28 “It really is the fact in this case,

9:31 that these mens’ lives may depend upon a comma.” Here’s the statute,

9:35 and it is rammed full of things.

9:37 Comma after comma after comma.

9:40 And they’re positioned in such a way as to create two perfectly reasonable,

9:45 very different interpretations.

9:47 It’s basically saying that certainly crimes,

9:49 if they carried the death penalty on land,

9:52 should be considered piracy on the high seas,

9:55 and therefore also receive the death penalty.

9:58 But the controversy surrounds this bit here.

10:03 The glut of commas makes it impossible to know

10:07 whether this caveat applies to just this bit, or to all of this bit.

10:14 And that’s a disaster,

10:15 because one of those interpretations makes all robbery on the high seas piracy,

10:21 but the other makes only the kind of robbery

10:24 that could get you sentenced to death on land piracy.

10:27 If the latter is the correct interpretation,

10:29 the three fellas walk away with their lives.

10:32 [Pirates] “Huzzah!” “Yay!”.

10:34 But the Supreme Court decided that it wasn’t.

10:37 [Disappointed pirates] “Oh…” Robbery on the high seas did count as piracy

10:40 whether it would be a capital offence in the US or not.

10:44 Are the three men pirates?

10:46 Yes they argghhhhh.

10:48 And yet… the trio walked free.

10:51 While the Supreme Court agreed what they did was piracy,

10:54 it also ruled that the US had no

10:57 business prosecuting them when the crime committed had been

11:00 against a foreign ship and they’d been commissioned

11:03 to rob it– it turned out– by a foreign government.

11:07 The three would-be pirates lived to plunder another day.

11:11 Next, can I show you what is easily

11:14 my favourite deployment of punctuation of all time?

11:16 Because it occurs just 30 years after the piratical punctuational escapade.

11:22 It’s in this 1848 book, “A pickle for the knowing ones”.

11:28 It’s was written by a, let’s say, “quirky” fella called Timothy Dexter,

11:33 an American businessman whose successes are

11:36 generally attributed to luck rather than skill.

11:39 In this book he tells the story of his life in breathless fashion.

11:45 So breathless, in fact, that there is not a single use of punctuation.

11:50 His sentences are technically endless.

11:54 However, at the very end of the book he appended this page.

11:58 A leaf filled with commas, colons, semi-colons, etc.

12:03 all of which come with no explanation.

12:06 Not in this edition anyway: in an older edition,

12:10 Lord Dexter included a small note

12:12 for the printer about this weird collection of marks.

12:16 “The knowing ones…”– by which he means, normal,

12:19 intelligent people– “...complain of my book the first edition had no stops.

12:23 I put in enough here and they may pepper and salt

12:27 it as they please.” So what he’s saying here is,

12:30 “You don’t like the lack of punctuation?

12:32 Here.

12:32 Choose your own.” What a guy.

12:36 Now, so far in this video, we’ve seen how sloppy punctuation can cost lives.

12:41 But it can also cost you an awful lot of money.

12:45 In 1872, the US Congress published its riveting-sounding Tariff Act of 1872.

12:53 It set out what duties importers of all manner of goods

12:56 would have to pay to get those goods into the United States.

13:00 However, it also included a “free list” which

13:03 described which goods were not subject to tariffs, i.e.

13:07 they were free to import.

13:09 On that list was written this: “Fruits, plants, tropical and semi-tropical,

13:15 for the purposes of propagation or cultivation.” So,

13:19 it’s reasonably clear, isn’t it?

13:21 There’s a bit of ambiguity over whether

13:23 the “tropical and semi-tropical” refers to just the plants,

13:26 or to the fruits and plants, and it’s a bit clunky to read,

13:29 but what is clear is that we’re dealing with two types of goods, aren’t we?

13:34 Fruits and plants.

13:36 Simple.

13:37 Except… this contains a rather unfortunate printing error.

13:41 Congress had in fact intended for the statute

13:44 to contain an exemption for “Fruit-plants, tropical and semi-tropical,

13:48 for the purposes of propagation or cultivation.” Uh-oh.

13:54 There’s quite a difference between these two, isn’t there?

13:56 One allows just plants and the other allows fruit and plants.

14:01 At the time, the publishers responsible

14:03 for this error were humiliated in the press.

14:07 The New York Times pointed out that firstly,

14:09 the “s” on fruits shouldn’t be there, and that secondly the hyphen after fruit

14:13 had been idiotically converted to a comma.

14:16 The Times then dramatically declared, “Here we have it!

14:20 The intention of Congress depending on a punctuation mark!” It witheringly

14:25 added “Such loose and slip-shod legislation by persons pretending to understand

14:30 the English language is disgraceful.” Importers of course took advantage

14:35 of the loophole created by the comma that should have been a hyphen,

14:38 and before it was closed, it’s since been estimated the mistake cost

14:44 US taxpayers two million dollars in unpaid revenue.

14:48 That’s the equivalent of today, 40 million dollars.

14:53 Ouch.

14:54 That is one costly comma, but not the only one witnessed in the United States.

14:59 Let’s move forward in time, quite a long way,

15:02 actually, to less than a decade ago,

15:04 to 2017 and to a hearing where the first words

15:08 out of the judge’s mouth were “For want of a comma,

15:12 we have this case.” Do you know what an Oxford comma is?

15:15 It’s sometimes also called a serial comma,

15:17 and it’s the comma that appears just before “and” or “or” in a list,

15:22 like“ “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” from the famous Winston Churchill quote.

15:28 That final comma is essentially optional.

15:31 Actually, despite the name “Oxford” comma,

15:33 it’s less likely to be used in the UK than in the US.

15:37 In fact, the official transcript

15:39 of that Churchill quote doesn’t actually have one.

15:42 I cheated.

15:43 Optional or not, without doubt the Oxford

15:46 comma can help avoid certain ambiguities.

15:49 Take this sentence, for example: “Meet my parents, Barney the Dinosaur,

15:54 and Shrek.” The serial comma makes clear we’re meeting four people:

16:00 my parents, Barney, and Shrek.

16:02 Leave the comma off,

16:03 and it appears to reveal I’m the offspring of dino and ogre.

16:07 [Barney and Shrek] “We love Rob” Which I’m not.

16:10 And just such an ambiguity is responsible

16:13 for the case before the Court of Appeals in 2017.

16:17 Delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy

16:19 argued that, despite their employer’s insistence,

16:22 their work should be eligible for overtime pay.

16:26 They pointed to a section of the law in the State of Maine

16:29 that provided that only the following activities should be exempt from overtime.

16:34 “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing,

16:38 packing for shipment or distribution of: Agricultural produce;

16:42 meat and fish products;

16:44 and perishable foods.” The dairy delivery drivers insisted

16:48 that they didn’t do any of these things,

16:51 so must therefore be eligible for juicy overtime pay.

16:56 However, Oakhurst disagreed saying the drivers were very

17:00 clearly responsible for the “distribution of” “perishable foods”.

17:05 Now, can you see what’s happening here?

17:07 The drivers and dairy are in disagreement

17:10 over one specific bit of this sentence.

17:13 So, Oakhurst is saying that “distribution” is one of the items on the list.

17:18 However, the drivers are claiming that it isn’t,

17:21 but rather “packing for shipment or distribution” is a single task.

17:26 A task that they do not perform.

17:30 They’re drivers not packers.

17:32 Initially, the District Court sided with the dairy,

17:35 saying the law clearly exempted distribution

17:38 of perishable foods from overtime protection.

17:41 But the circuit judge at the Court of Appeals thought otherwise,

17:45 saying “If that exemption used a serial comma…” i.e.

17:48 and Oxford comma “to mark off the last of the activities that it lists,

17:53 then the exemption would clearly encompass

17:55 an activity that the drivers perform.” However,

17:58 the law contained no such comma and thus

18:01 the judge adopted the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption,

18:05 and reversed the previous judgment.

18:08 The drivers won and the case and it

18:11 was reportedly settled for $5 million dollars.

18:13 Looking at the legislation in Maine now,

18:15 you can see that they’ve fixed the law– opting to go

18:18 belt and braces by using semi-colons to separate up the list.

18:21 You can also see that, ultimately,

18:24 the dairy’s interpretation was the correct one.

18:26 The comma is not the only punctuation mark

18:29 whose addition or omission has had oversized consequences.

18:33 One of the marvellous things about English is that with a single

18:37 squiggle and a dot we can transform a statement into a question.

18:41 For example, “You ate my hamster”.

18:44 Statement.

18:45 “You ate my hamster?” Question, to which the answer will hopefully be “no”.

18:50 A mere question mark can turn the certain into the uncertain.

18:55 And there is a marvellous historical instance in which

19:00 this punctuation superpower was used to ridiculous effect.

19:04 In 1916, while Britain was bogged down

19:06 in the First World War and executing Irish heroes,

19:10 the USA– which was yet to join the war– was holding a presidential election.

19:15 Incumbent Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson,

19:18 faced Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes.

19:22 Now, it had been almost a century since

19:24 a Democrat incumbent had won a second term,

19:26 and as the results came in, it became apparent

19:29 that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t about to buck that trend.

19:32 Hughes looked on course for victory,

19:35 and so confident were some newspaper editors that the Republican had won,

19:38 that they put their papers to bed that very

19:41 night with headlines declaring that he had done.

19:44 Supposedly among the papers to do this was New York’s The Evening World.

19:48 I couldn’t actually find the front page in question.

19:50 It appears to have been expunged

19:52 from the record for reasons that will become apparent.

19:55 But according to accounts from the time, The Evening World initially went

19:59 with the headline “HUGHES ELECTED IN CLOSE CONTEST”.

20:03 President-elect Charles Hughes must have gone

20:05 to bed on election night pleased as punch.

20:08 Victory was assured.

20:11 However, the journalist Walter Millis later wrote about what happened next.

20:16 “When Mr Hughes awoke that morning his photograph was

20:19 still resplendent upon the front pages of the late editions.

20:22 The World’s banner headline stood as before save

20:26 the the addition of one small punctuation mark.

20:30 It now read: “HUGHES ELECTED IN CLOSE CONTEST?”” The element

20:35 of doubt injected by the question mark was well founded.

20:38 Hughes had in fact lost,

20:41 as the Library of Congress’s archived edition of the New York World shows.

20:45 They did eventually get it right,

20:47 although they were still hedging their bets with “probably”.

20:49 That whole incident must have

20:51 been absolutely gutting for almost-President Hughes,

20:54 but at least that punctuation mark didn’t cost

20:57 anyone their lives or anyone millions of dollars.

21:00 And in that spirit of frivolity, let’s look at a few more of some

21:03 of the sillier punctuation errors that the internet has to offer.

21:07 I’m a big fan of this Reddit called “suspicious quotes”

21:11 which charts all manner of bonkers use of quotation marks.

21:15 Usually what’s happened is somebody has used them for emphasis,

21:17 which is not what they are for.

21:20 For example: “If you drop a “cup” on the floor

21:24 please pick it up.” What is “cup” code for here?

21:28 What is the actual name of this hotel, if it’s not actually “Aragon”?

21:33 What meat is this if it isn’t actually “pork”?

21:37 And unless this is really a front for some other sort of laundering,

21:41 get rid of the quotation marks.

21:43 And from the “Punctuation Kills” reddit,

21:45 this meme always serves as food for thought,

21:48 stressing the difference between “Congrats” on your baby.

21:52 Congrats on “your” baby.

21:54 And, Congrats on your “baby”.

21:58 Yeah.

21:59 “Punctuation matters”.

22:00 Thanks for watching.

22:01 If you enjoyed this, I reckon you’ll like this one too.

22:05 Ooh, and if you happen to be in London on the 11th of April and at a loose end,

22:09 I’m doing two live shows at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

22:12 Come and see me.

22:13 I’ll leave a link to tickets below.

22:15 You can also check out my free newsletter.

22:19 Until next time: take care.