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Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: Difference between revisions
Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma (view source)
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* It's possible to replace parentheses, if you really must, with other punctuation marks. Emdashes work—it's one of their alternative uses—as do commas. However, if you are doing this, please—for the love of god) ''don't switch from one to the other halfway through''.
== Example's from
===
* A mildly famous scene from ''[[Preacher (Comic Book)]]'': "Improper use of inverted commas, Hoover! [http://www.freewebs.com/dobermansatplay/Preacher3.jpg Improper use of inverted commas!!]{{Dead link}}"
* In ''[[The Boys]]'' (also by Garth Ennis), Hughie reads a comic book out loud: "an' he's goin'... I hope this '''hurts''' --in bold-- every bit as '''much''' --in bold-- as what you '''did''' --in bold-- to that '''boy''' --[[Bold Inflation|in bold]]... [[Conversational Troping|Why do they do that anyway]]? It's really annoyin' trynna read it, it makes it like stop-start, stop-start, stop-start, you know?"
* [[Deadpool]] lampshaded his own overuse of the ellipsis by announcing he was "talking like...Shatner".
* Mocked in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-09-24/ this] ''[[Dilbert]]'' comic.▼
* As a general rule, [[Silver Age]] Marvel comics would end ''every single sentence'' with an exclamation point! Justified a bit, as [[Stan Lee]] actually talks like that! Excelsior!
** Same thing about movie / TV series parodies in [[Mad Magazine]].
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* As pointed out above in the capitalization section, Delirium of the ''[[Sandman]]'' comics frequently misuses capital letters. She also tends to go without commas and periods sometimes when she's rambling. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] somewhat in that she's the [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] of ''crazy''.
* The Mad Hatter from ''[[Batman]]'' as written by [[Jeph Loeb]] speaks in aLterNATinG cAPs.
* ''[[Krazy Kat]]''. Along with some minor [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]], many nouns would end up in quotation marks. This is not limited to Krazy's [[Funetik Aksent]].▼
* [[Speech Bubbles]] in general tend to be printed in ALL CAPS. ''[[The Ultimates]]'' specifically didn't do that.
=== Eastern Animation ===▼
* The old Soviet-era cartoon ''The Land of Skipped Homeworks'' (Страна не? ыученных уроко?) had one phrase that later became [[Memetic Mutation|the '''direct''' illustration of this trope]]. The protagonist, Victor Perestukkin, a labrake kid and his cat (talking cat during his travels) Kuzya had to pass various obstacles... straightly based on the homework he skipped, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|as the title implies.]] The mentioned illustration comes in the point where the Master Verb gives him a final task: finish writing his death order by putting only one comma in the correct sentence: ''Execute not pardon''.▼
=== Fan
* The [[Crowning Moment of Funny]] in the ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' fanfic ''[[My Immortal]]'': "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!" It was................................. Dumbledore!
* While it runs across the board in [http://captainbobbin.deviantart.com/ this] author's work, comma splicing is taken [[Beyond the Impossible|to the extremes]] in [https://web.archive.org/web/20130124143620/http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/027/2/6/xemsai___cb_romance_shorts_20_by_captainbobbin-d383ny3.html this piece].
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* [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6458927/1/Angel_on_Campus This] Harry Potter fic. The second chapter alone is only five pages long on word processor, yet it has 357 commas.
▲=== Films ===
* ''[[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?]]''. The title is a question, but there is no question mark. Supposedly it wasn't included because question marks are considered "bad luck" in the film industry. Do they really think all of the annoyed letters they're going to get when they don't include a question mark will be worth it?
** That would seem to imply that the title is an answer, not a question. That is, 'the man "who framed Roger Rabbit".'
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{{quote|'''"Gay" Perry''': What, fuckhead? Who taught you grammar? Badly's an adverb. Get out. Vanish. }}
▲=== Jokes ===
* There's a famous joke about a misplaced comma in a nature brochure on panda bears. Instead of "Eats shoots and leaves" (meaning what pandas consume for food) it reads, "Eats, shoots and leaves," [[Don't Explain the Joke|meaning that it eats, then uses a gun and leaves]]. This inspired the title of Lynne Truss' [[Eats Shoots and Leaves|famous book]].
** Whoever composed that pamphlet really should have used a colon instead of a comma (and even that would have been unnecessary).
* One British comedy show from the mid-to-late 20th century had a sketch where an orator added a comma to "What is this thing called love?", resulting in the question "What is this thing called, love?"
* A relatively recent joke about the importance of the Oxford Comma (the one at the end of a list of items), where leaving it out changes the meaning of an award-acceptance speech from a Scientologist: "I'd like to thank my parents, God and L. Ron Hubbard."
=== Literature ===
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{{quote|''"and at best a legitimate action, on Meursault's part, in self-defence, rather than, as the prosecution allege at Meursault's trial, murder in the first degree."''}}
=== Live: Action TV ===▼
▲=== Live Action TV ===
* William Shatner provides a verbal version of this trope in ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]''.
* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' [[In-Universe]] example: Jack O'Neill interrupts ''his own torture'' to point out a bad guy's grammatical error: "You ended that sentence with a preposition! Bastard!"
** As pointed out in the earlier section, this is one of the zombie rules of grammar. It's dead, but it just refuses to lie down. Of course, it's [[I Shall Taunt You|hardly out of character]] for O'Neill to do exactly this sort of thing; he may even have known it was a "zombie" rule, but who cares as long as you get the other guy confused or angry?
* ''[[Doctor Who
=== Music ===
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* [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] lambastes more than a few of these in his song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc "Word Crimes"]. The video is an invaluable teaching aid, illustrating the errors in question.
=== New! Media! ===▼
▲=== New Media ===
* When simple apostrophes or quote marks are replaced by an unreadable character sequence, due to encoding problems. There are a million different versions of this, and it's particularly bad on wikis due to the large number of different pieces of software (everyone's browser).
** To wit, an earlier version of this very entry said <nowiki>"probably because of a ?½¶[[feature?½¶]] of the other troper?¤©æ#8482;s browser.",</nowiki> and it was later mangled twice (once to replace all the symbols with �, the next to replace each of those with the sequence �).
** [[Jargon File|The Hacker Jargon File]], for another example, has a default encoding which causes punctuation signs and non-breaking spaces to become a � sign (for those of you who can't see it, that's the Unicode "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER" and looks like a question mark inside a black diamond).
* One of the crackpots who is responsible for dozens of hoaxes when it comes to ''[[Lost]]'' spoilers is named ThEmIsFiTiShErE. What's worse is that, in his posts, he puts certain, random, often ''unimportant'' words in all-caps, making the reader just want to stab him in the face after a while. He also can't spell for crap.
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* Once on the [[GameFAQs]] television message board, someone made a topic asking "are there only fools and horses on american tv?". There was a lot of confusion and bafflement that someone would believe this before it was finally pointed out that ''[[Only Fools and Horses]]'' is the name of a television show.
=== Newspaper Comic's ===
▲* Mocked in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-09-24/ this] ''[[Dilbert]]'' comic.
▲* ''[[Krazy Kat]]''. Along with some minor [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]], many nouns would end up in quotation marks. This is not limited to Krazy's [[Funetik Aksent]].
=== Print 'Media' ===
* The Women's Weekly magazines at checkout lines are apparently compelled by law to end every internal headline, front-page teaser, caption, and generally any sentence or clause outside of an article with either a question mark or an exclamation point. Feeling fat? Lose 200 pounds with this Ancient Chinese secret! While you stuff your obese offspring with these hideously ugly confections of pure sugar! Made from ingredients found in your local discount rack! Depressed? Buy a new purse! Like the one worn by this famous actress! Emphasis of everything actually equals emphasis of nothing? That's not what Oprah says!
* The children's book publisher ''Troll'' does the same thing in the newsletter that says what new books it's publishing. This is typically coupled with a rather hammy style of blurb that's apparently intended to make the reader think all their books are pulse-pounders, but more often comes off as [[Narm]].
=== Theatre ===
* For a while at least, [[George Bernard Shaw]] abandoned the use of apostrophes in most contractions—even writing "he'll" without the apostrophe—though he dropped that practice later:
{{quote|I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he'll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.|Letter to ''The Author'', April 1902}}
** Which, of course, means that he didn't realize at the time that "won't" and "wont" are also two different words.
* The Dutch comedian [[Herman Finkers]] plays with this in his linguistic fairytale ''Het Spreukjesbos''
{{quote|Hansel said "Gretel, shall I wear my pretty dress today?"
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** Acutally, [[Herman Finkers]] is a master of wordplay. The full joke requires some explanation. In the Netherlands, Hansel and Gretel are called Hans en Grietje. After the bit described above Hans responds with: Don't be so weird, Grietje Titulaer. Now, this might not be weird, but around the time this show ran, there was a well known Dutch public figure going by the name Chriet Titulaer. Chriet is a ''male'' name. To top it off: Chriet and Griet are pronounched exactly the same. He even mentions that Hans and Grietje are the Titulaer brothers. And this is just the very start of the "Spreukjesbos" segment.
▲=== Video Games ===
* ''[[Tomb Raider]]: Angel of Darkness''. While punctuation errors are the least of its problems, whoever was in charge of the game's font apparently considered certain punctuation marks such as apostrophes far too exotic, and therefore they were replaced with a square symbol.
** Sounds like the inappropriate use of a title font, many of which are lacking non-alphanumeric symbols except those someone bothered to create.
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* ''[[Guitar Hero|Guitar Hero: Smash Hits]]'' would be guilty of using quotation marks for emphasis, if they had actually used quotation marks rather than the offending apostrophes.
▲=== Web Comics ===
* ''[[Bob the Angry Flower]]'' rants against misuse of apostrophes in [http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif this comic].
* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' sometimes has an animated period reading posts from gaming forums and chiding the writers for their lack of capitalization and other grammatical errors.
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* [[Rock Paper Cynic]] has one of the most awesome examples ever [http://www.rockpapercynic.com/index.php?date=2010-12-06 here.]
=== "Web" Original ===▼
▲=== Web Original ===
* "Cruelty to the Uncommon Comma" is a charge in the ''[[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]]'', especially the Department of Technical Errors (which the Uncommon Comma leads).
* ''[[Zero Punctuation]]'' is called that because the creator speaks very fast and without pauses, in the manner of someone reading a document without any punctuation. Mercifully his articles are not written this way.
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* This is responsible for many, many [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/ Cake Wrecks], be it [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/06/we-learned-good.html eye-searingly awful misspellings] or [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/08/perfectly-punctual.html horrible punctuation].
=== Real ... Life ===▼
▲=== Eastern Animation ===
▲* The old Soviet-era cartoon ''The Land of Skipped Homeworks'' (Страна не? ыученных уроко?) had one phrase that later became [[Memetic Mutation|the '''direct''' illustration of this trope]]. The protagonist, Victor Perestukkin, a labrake kid and his cat (talking cat during his travels) Kuzya had to pass various obstacles... straightly based on the homework he skipped, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|as the title implies.]] The mentioned illustration comes in the point where the Master Verb gives him a final task: finish writing his death order by putting only one comma in the correct sentence: ''Execute not pardon''.
▲=== Real Life ===
* The minefield of grammatical rules, exceptions and linguistic gray areas is the main reason why most major publications adopt or create an official style guide for its writers.
* This is far, far, far too common in Dutch, where the apostrophe denotes a short grapheme corresponding to a long vowel in plurals, mostly in originally foreign words. (Example: "Auto" means "car". "Auto's" means "cars", because "Autos" would be pronounced wrong, and "Autoos" goes against all grammar rules.) The apostrophe stands for a sound that's included in speech, but left out in written language. It... tends to go wrong.
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