The Case of Pittsburgh’s Missing Comma

This email from Lori Randall appeared in my inbox the other day:

I’ve been enjoying your book How to Not Write Bad, but I came across a passage on page 19 that puzzles me. Here’s the passage in question:

 

“The majority of my students would write Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is his hometown - leaving out the (required) comma after Pennsylvania because they wouldn’t pause at that point in the sentence.”

 

I can’t think of any context in which a comma would be required after the word Pennsylvania in this sentence. It seems to me that a comma between “Pennsylvania” and “is” would separate the subject from the verb. I always struggled mightily to discourage my students from using punctuation to separate the subject from the verb in any given sentence! I think I must be missing something; please help me understand!

The comma after Pennsylvania seemed obvious to me, but that wasn’t a good answer to the question, and I realized I didn’t have one at hand.

I did grasp that Ms. Randall’s subject-verb concern was misplaced. After all, one would would put a comma after Phillies in the sentence “My favorite team, the Phillies, are in first place,” even though the verb comes right after it. Phillies serves as an appositive, a non-restrictive parenthetical element, and these always call for a comma both before and after. “My hometown, New York City, has five boroughs.” “The American ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, gave a speech yesterday.” However, in the sentence in question, Pennsylvania isn’t an appositive, but rather a restrictive or defining element, telling us where Pittsburgh located. Maybe there shouldn’t even be a comma before the state?

I digress to say that many years ago, my wife directed student residence at the University of Pennsylvania, which included responsibility for mail delivery. I’ve always remembered her telling me post office staffers told her that they preferred no comma before the abbreviated all-caps state in mailing addresses. And here it is in black and white, from the USPS website:

Clearly, I needed to do some research. I turned first to The Associated Press Stylebook, which prescribed the comma but gave no explanation, merely an example: “The Selma, Alabama, group saw the governor.”  American-style dates present a comparable situation — the year is not really an appositive but is treated as such. And the Stylebook endorsed the same approach: “Feb. 14, 1987, is the target date.”

My 1999 edition of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage agrees on both counts, but a hint of dissatisfaction creeps in regarding the city-state construction (emphasis added): “Commas are used when constructions like this are unavoidable: ‘the Salem, Ore., public schools’; ‘a Columbus, Ohio, newspaper.’”

The hint expands to full-fledged distaste in Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016). He writes that state and year each “normally take a comma or some other punctuation after it (unless the place name or date were used as an adjective — see ADJECTIVE (D) & DATES (C)).” (I offer no comment on Garner’s use of faux-subjunctive were.) I turned to ADJECTIVE (D). There, Garner asserts that the formulations “Sacramento, California home and “Austin, Texas jury” are not “acceptable.” But then he says that it’s “worse” to place a second comma after the state. He then disapprovingly quotes a sentence from a Wall Street Journal article that refers to “an Elizabeth, N.J., warehouse” and claims that this kind of construction would “bother literate readers.”

Wait, what? I have always thought of myself as literate and that doesn’t bother me a bit.

Garner warms to the theme in DATES (C), where he supports the non-comma in “The court reconsidered its July 12, 2001 privilege order.” He offers two reasons:

First, the comma is really just separating the two numerals, so if a second comma isn’t syntactically required, then it doesn’t belong. … Second, the comma after the date marks a nonexistent pause; when a full date is used adjectivally, a knowledgeable speaker marches toward the noun instead of pausing after the year. An adjective represents a surge forward, while a comma represents a backward-looking pause. It makes little sense to punctuate a forward-looking adjective with a pause at the end of it.

Backward, forward …. It all struck me as crazy talk. First of all, while “July 12″ serves as a modifier, it’s no adjective. But leaving that aside, there is ample precedent for commas following adjectives. “It was a hot, though cloudless, day” is solid. “It was a hot, though cloudless day” would bother literate readers, who might find themselves asking, “What’s a ‘though cloudless day’?” More broadly, punctuation conventions for the most part aren’t dictated by pauses or other rhythmic concerns. Punctuation often does bring about pauses in our silent reading, but prose has a different rhythm from speech. Writing for the ear is great, but writing for the mind’s ear, a register that has its own peculiar, sometimes syncopated rhythms, is great, too. Just ask John Updike or Samuel Johnson.

All that said, it would appear that the arc of history is on Garner’s side. The line in my book about my students leaving out the comma after Pennsylvania is anecdotal. For something a little more scientific, I created a Twitter poll asking which version is preferable: A, “an Akron, Ohio resident,” or B, “an Akron, Ohio, resident.” A lot of my Twitter followers are writers and/or editors. So I was shocked to find that 49 percent of the respondents chose A.

There seems to be something that prompts even the most literate among us to leave out that comma. This appeared on the website of The New Yorker on July 17:

Did you notice? No comma after Ohio. And this was written by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, no less.

It’s a good thing that my friend Wes Davis sent me a screen shot of the passage, because, some time between July 18 and now, someone at the magazine located a comma and put it in the appropriate place.

So, for the moment, reason continues to prevail. At least at The New Yorker.

I hope that helps, Lori Randall.