The Pause That Refreshes

Many years ago, flying by happenstance with the late Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. and a leading Defense official* on board the former’s private twin-engine aircraft from Vigan to Manila, I witnessed at close range what I would call a person with a gift for plain talk rather than oratory. At that time, then Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis “Chavit” Singson lay bloodied in a hospital in Vigan, a victim of two grenade blasts that marred a fiesta dance in Cabugao the night before, claiming the lives of eight merrymakers. Sen. Aquino and the Defense official had flown in to tour the scene of the carnage and to visit Gov. Singson, and as a newspaper reporter I followed their every move and took note of every little word they said. I myself had come in from Manila on board my newspaper’s plane, but stayed behind when it became apparent that the bombing tragedy was far worse than the initial news agency dispatch had indicated. So when Sen. Aquino’s Cabugao swing was over, I found myself boarding his plane like it was the most natural thing in the world, thus giving me a vantage point for observing how his mind and language worked.

Apart from his obvious intelligence, what struck me most about Sen. Aquino was his being a nonstop talker who could shift effortlessly from English to Tagalog and vice versa. He was every bit like a munitions expert as he talked about grenades, glibly describing its various types and how each would inflict damage on flesh, and it was amusing that the Defense official, who was his main audience, could only gamely butt in with remarks like “Ganon ba ’yun, pare?” while the senator rattled off facts and figures until we landed at Nichols Airbase.** The wonder of it all was that his talk made complete sense with hardly any comma or period. The only thing you could fault him with was that he spoke a virtual monologue; there simply was no way anybody can get a word in, short of perhaps telling him that the plane was on fire or had run out of aviation fuel. Unlike his political archenemy, then President Ferdinand Marcos, a great talker himself but actually a slurrer with frequent “uhmms” and “ehmms,” Sen. Aquino was not —and hardly made any “ahs” either. He was a perfectly fluent fireside-chat charmer, one who could pedantically lecture you and yet make you feel that he was wooing you. To my mind, he had actually mastered the art of speaking in the same way that Ernest Hemingway had mastered writing, weaving tales and prose with fascinating precision, giving the deceptive feeling that there was really no need for commas and periods—only natural breathing pauses—in this world.

To do what Sen. Aquino could do with speech and Hemingway with prose, or to imitate James Joyce by banishing all punctuations altogether (as in his novel Ulysses), requires at the very least a small touch of linguistic genius. That, however, is something not all of us are fortunate to claim, much less to have. Thus, when we write or talk, we have to mind at all times our punctuation marks, using them with precision so that we can get ourselves clearly understood and avoid lapsing into incoherence. To use the advertising catch phrase of a popular softdrink brand long ago, we have to provide our readers or listeners with “the pause that refreshes,” one that periodically restores the mind’s capacity to absorb what we are drilling into it.

Among the very first things we have to do with our English, therefore, is to master its major punctuations: the period, or what the British call the “full stop,” and the comma. Periods should not be a problem at all. They are, as you know, mainly used to mark the end of sentences as complete statements, as the ending dot in the “The world is an apple.” They are, of course, also used to mark abbreviations, as in “Ph.D.” for Doctor of Philosophy, “Brit.” for British, and “Ford Co.” for Ford Company. The only caveat we should remember is not to write the period twice when the abbreviation occurs at the very end of a sentence, as in “There is doubt about the English of our teachers in the English Dept.” Not a very well-bred way to close, but perfectly okay as punctuation goes.

The comma, on the other hand, is a somewhat more complicated linguistic creature. It has more specialized uses than the period, and the choice to use it involves more than just a stylistic decision. A sentence is either correct or wrong without it. At one extreme in the use of commas is the license taken by certain poets in overusing them, as in Jose Garcia Villa’s poem, “Anchored Angel":

And,lay,he,down,the,golden,father,

(Genesis,fist,all,gentle,now).

between, the, Wall, of,China,and,

The,tiger,tree (his, centuries,his,

Aerials,of,light)…

Anchored,entire,angel!

He,in,his,estate,miracle,and, living,dew,

His,fuses,gold,his,cobalts,love,

And,in,his,eyepits,

O,under,the,liontelling, sun,

The,zeta,truth-the,swift,red,Christ.

At the other extreme, of course, is the extremely sparing use of it, which could be as downright confusing if you are not as articulate as a Sen. Aquino or as artful as a Hemingway.

We obviously cannot afford to take liberties with commas then, so we will confine ourselves to their more conventional uses. Here they are: (a) To indicate where to pause in reading a text to make the meaning clear and unambiguous, as in: “I believe in his intelligence, integrity, and honesty.” (b) To set apart multiple adjectives before a noun, except when the final adjectives form a compound with the noun itself, as in: “Jennifer was a tall, fair, and attractive Filipina advertising executive.” (c) To separate a non-defining relative clause from its antecedent, as in: “My friend Alberto, who had his visa interview only last week, is now scheduled to fly to New York for a plum advertising job.” (d) To allow for parenthetic expressions within sentences, as in: “To see more of Europe, unless pressed for time, tour it leisurely by backpacking.” (e) To separate items in a list, especially shorter ones, as in: “The annual summit took up the following urgent global issues: famine in undeveloped countries, pollution, water scarcity, and ozone layer depletion.” and (f) To mark off and make it easier to read large numbers such as hundreds, thousands, and millions, as in: “The price tag of $12,820,422 for a yacht is mind-boggling any way you look at it.”

This, in a nutshell, is really all there is to know about English commas. (Written circa 2003-2004) 

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times and subsequently appeared as Chapter 50 in the English Grammar Revisited section of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*This official was unnamed in the original appearance of this essay and the author felt that for authenticity’s sake, it’s better to keep it that way.

**Renamed in 1982 as the Jesus Villamor Air Base.

NB. Former Sen. Benigno Aquino III, returning to the Philippines after three years of self-exile in the United States, was gunned down by an assassin and died upon arrival at the Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983.