Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar

Rather more than prepositions, I find myself talking about conjunctions to my students. “Therefore” is not a conjunction and so cannot be inserted with a comma like “but” or “and.” For Stein a conjunction “has a force that need not make any one feel that they are dull. Conjunctions have made themselves live by their work.” And it’s clear what that work is: conjunctions are among the basic logical units that determine what makes a sentence meaningful or not.

And now, it’s time to come to “the real question of punctuation, periods, commas, colons, semicolons and capitals and small letters.” Periods for Stein were problematic, although they had to be tolerated. After all, “physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop some time then periods had to exist . . . I did believe in periods and I used them.”

But commas and semicolons? No, never. “Commas are servile they have no life of their own they are dependent upon use and convenience and they are put there for practical purposes.” In fact, commas for Stein were (in contemporary parlance) codependent enablers: “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it . . . the use of them was positively degrading.” Semicolons were equivalent to commas, effectively slaves of the sentence.

I don’t feel as strongly about commas as Stein did, and who can, really? And there’s the dreaded question mark.