Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Wow. Do you guys own the movie rights?

I hate getting misquoted and, especially, mispunctuated. Didn't Grant come out against the serial comma? Maybe he was the editor.

I wonder how much a comma costs in bulk. It has to be under $100 per gigacomma, and most of that is probably fixed setup cost. There's the typing, the storage, the time and manpower of proofing as additional fixed costs. Then there's the paper real estate, as well as the ink as ongoing costs per comma in printing.

Take the New York Times, with a conservative 1000 potential serial commas per daily newspaper — more on Sundays — and a circulation of over 900,000 a day, the removal of serial commas could save over 328.5 billion commas a year. At $100 per gigacomma, that would save the New York Times $32,800 a year.

That's someone's job!

Now, if only we could eliminate the possessive apostrophe — it is, after all, one of the least charitable of the punctuation marks — we could make a real dent in unemployment.