At last, I\u2019ve been vindicated. After years of grinding my teeth while reading shoddy prose, it\u2019s happened: A U.S. court of appeals judge has officially agreed that commas matter\u2014and he\u2019s fined a Maine dairy company $5 million for omitting one.<\/p>\n
The sentence at the heart of the dairy truck drivers’ case was this one:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
\n(1) Agricultural produce;
\n(2) Meat and fish products; and
\n(3) Perishable foods.\u201d<\/p>\n
The truck drivers were ticked off about the fact that there was no comma after the word \u201cshipment.\u201d Apparently, because of that missing comma, they were forced to work overtime without compensation (no, I don\u2019t understand it, either, but let\u2019s stay focused\u2014we\u2019re excited about commas, remember?).<\/p>\n
The judge mulled over their complaint (and, I suspect, checked his copy of Strunk and White\u2019s The Elements of Style<\/em>) and decided that the dairy company did, indeed, make a grammatical error\u2014and that they were using that error to wiggle out of paying their truckers overtime. Now, they owe $5 million in back pay.<\/p>\n The moral of the story? Grammar matters\u2014and commas are worth up to $5 million each (I\u2019ve included 21 of them in this post, just in case any of you are feeling generous).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At last, I\u2019ve been vindicated. After years of grinding my teeth while reading shoddy prose, it\u2019s happened: A U.S. court of appeals judge has officially agreed that commas matter\u2014and he\u2019s fined a Maine dairy company $5 million for omitting one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":729,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions\/729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}