Recently Steven Pinker was on a podcast talking about grammar, the particular subject was comma splices. In short, he hates them, he thinks they are barbaric.

A comma splice is the joining of two independent clauses with nothing more than a bare comma, as I have done in the two sentences above. I’m surprised that Pinker, who is modern in so many ways, is offended by something as innocuous as the comma splice. It suits the second of the two sentences quite well, I think. Certainly better than a period, and also better than a semicolon, which could weigh down such a short sentence.

Commas are used as syntactical boundary markers, showing how parts of the sentence relate to one another. Sometimes they are also necessary for clarity. But they, like other punctuation marks, originated as guides to oral performance. The old rule, “Put a comma in whenever you take a breath,” is no longer reliable, though its pull is still great. In the sentence “He strapped his saddle on the old horse, and with a slight gesture rode off,” the comma breaking up the strapped-rode pair is there for dramatic effect. Syntactically it is wrong, or at least uncalled-for.

We tend to think of the comma as indicating a pause, but often commas can be passed over without the slightest ripple in time. While you wouldn’t write, “We, went to the market today,” because it forces a pause between the subject and predicate, where there shouldn’t be one, you might very well write, “What they thought it was, was a large dog.” Here, the comma between subject and predicate is necessary for clarity, to divide the “was was” construction. But it doesn’t require a pause. The comma may instead signal an abrupt intonation shift, with the second “was” being somewhat buried. Just the way the sentence would be read without the comma if we knew how to read it—or how it would be spoken.

The same tonal shift can replace the pause in “He hates them, he thinks they’re barbaric.” And that, to me, makes the comma splice valuable. You can’t get that effect with a semicolon or period.

I’ve been using comma splices for so long that I had forgotten there was even an issue before I heard Pinker. There are certainly places where I wouldn’t use a comma to join two clauses, but it was never because of a comma-splice dictum; it was more “does this feel right?” As John Updike would say, “Those weren’t tough questions, those were kid-glove questions.”