A Word, Please: Fielding some softball questions

The questions coming my way lately have been short and sweet and easily spun into some helpful tips. Here’s a sampling I hope you’ll find useful.

A reader named Walter wanted to know whether, in “I speak French, but I don’t speak Swahili,” there should be a comma after “French.”

MORE: Read past columns on all things grammar from June Casagrande >>

Comma rules say that whenever two clauses are connected with “but,” “and” or “or,” you usually insert a comma. But if the sentence is short and poses no danger of confusion, you can skip the comma if you like: “I speak French but I don’t speak Swahili.”

Walter also wanted to know about a comma before “and” in a list, as in “June has taught in China, Austria, India(,) and Greece.” That comma, called the Oxford or serial comma, is correct in most book and magazine publishing, but it’s incorrect in most news outlets. The reason: It’s simply a style choice, neither right nor wrong.

Walter posed yet another comma question, this one near and dear to my heart. Look at the sentence: Claudette Colbert won the Oscar for “It Happened One Night” (,) though she hated making the picture.

If you know where to put that comma, you’re ahead of perhaps 95% of the population. Here’s the rule: In American English, a comma or period always goes before a closing quotation mark. It doesn’t matter if the quotation marks indicate a movie title, call attention to an individual “word,” or signify a direct quotation. It doesn’t matter that the comma or period isn’t technically part of the quotation.

Logic and meaning are irrelevant in this style convention, which is rooted in purely aesthetic considerations: “word”, just looks ugly.

Question marks and exclamation points are different. They can come before or after a closing quote mark depending on whether they apply to the whole sentence or just the quoted portion. The slogan is “Got milk?” Is the slogan “Just do it”?

Another question is illustrated in this sentence: “Betty is one of those people who like(s) cupcakes.”

This one’s a little tricky, but there’s a clear answer: The relative pronoun “who” always agrees in number with its antecedent — that is, the noun it refers to. So in a sentence where “who” means “Betty,” it’s singular: “I spoke with Betty, who likes cupcakes.” In this example the verb conjugation “likes” is correct because “who” refers to the singular noun “Betty.”

But in our example sentence, “who” refers not to “Betty” but to “people.” We’re not talking about “Betty who likes” cupcakes. We’re stating that Betty is among “people who like” cupcakes. The pronoun “who” is standing in for the plural noun “people,” so it gets a plural verb.

I also got a good question about job titles. A reader named Nancy had seen an article that mentioned “the five-year city gardener” and thought that looked wrong. “Surely, this title should be capitalized as are those of city appointees working full-time ... This woman is amazing in the breadth of her knowledge of horticulture and city landscaping.”

Actually, capitalization has nothing to do with honoring someone or showing respect. It’s mostly about editing style and, in general, most editing styles try to avoid the visual bumpiness of capital letters.

In my work, we lowercase most professional titles, capitalizing them only when they function as part of a name: “The senator, who is often referred to as Senator John Jones.” “The principal, whom the kids call Principal Skinner.”

The generic use is lowercase. That’s pretty standard, though a lot of news outlets make an exception for the President when referring to the president of the United States.

And if you’re wondering whether the Senator before his name should be abbreviated Sen., there’s no right answer for that, either. Again, it’s a style choice. No way to get that one wrong.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.