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Comment by kissiel | Hacker News Reader

As a non-native English speaker: why is there a comma in the title?

Apparently it is a stylistic choice to add a pause, acceptable in informal or rhetorical writing, though grammatically incorrect.

Like: "I'm getting fed up of making the rich... well, richer".

The problem with using this as an analogy is that the commas attach to the interjection "well," not to the words "rich" or "richer." Remove the "well" and you should remove all the punctuation around it.

"I'm getting fed up of making the rich... richer" might be grammatically ok in informal text, but a comma is definitely wrong.

It’s not wrong if it’s commonly used and commonly understood

Of course it is. Doing a wrong thing a lot doesn't make it less wrong. Over time maybe its "wrongness" will change the way language naturally changes over time.

But today, it's wrong.

That change has already occurred. What are you waiting for?

Its wrong

I think a lot of English speakers use commas to emphasize a pause in speech. I don’t think a comma was needed. I think the author was slightly mixing up the relative clauses and appositives rules with commas. Source: native speaker, North America

EDIT: I like qwertox’s answer best

It's a stylistic choice and probably not strictly correct

Personal choice of the author. It would be grammatically correct without the comma.

it's not grammatically correct but reflects a pausing speaking style to avoid confusion generated from repeating the same word twice in a row, and also to emphasize the repetition (a thing becoming more of a thing after already being that thing). (others are telling you whether it's correct per textbook rules or that it's purely stylistic but not why it's used in practice and what it conveys)

There are “close” and “open” styles of comma usage. “Open” has been ascendant for the last few decades (it began to rise in the early 20th century, but wasn’t firmly dominant until later). It’s less precise and expressive, but “cleaner”.

Source: Garner’s.

Because native English users don't follow a style book. As much as English teachers in school want pupils to be prescriptivists in academic contexts, native English communication (writing/speaking) is better understood using a descriptivist lens.

Native English speakers don't know how to use commas, so they throw them anywhere they want to have a pause.

sounds like they know how to use commas, then

Second amendment jurisprudence says otherwise. Billions of dollars spent on litigating three commas.

> Native English speakers don't know how to use commas, so they throw them anywhere they want to have a pause.

Like with any language, there are wildly varying levels of literacy. Many native English speakers know how to use commas, and many others don't. I think that shades from using them grammatically (most literate), to using them ungrammatically as a generic pause, to not using punctuation at all.

There aren't fixed rules, even to the degree to which there are such rules for other grammatical questions in English. Much of comma usage comes down to preference.

I think part of why we've shifted so strongly against their use is because if you leave it up to taste, as had previously been common, most people make poor choices.

It's funny because even as we've moved away from prescriptivism, the "rules" around comma usage have tightened and people have gotten quicker to call a given previously-common usage incorrect.

There are rules around comma usage that are up to taste (eg the Oxford comma), and people get very dogmatic about these rules for bad reasons. There are also times when usage of a comma is incorrect according to all the known rulesets for English grammar. This usage is in the latter category.

The notion that a comma is any sort of pause fell out of favor in written English in the 1800's and thankfully hasn't been back (see the second amendment as to why "a comma is a generic pause" is a bad idea). You would have to be the loosest form of descriptivist to say that this usage is close to correct, and I would question whether you would accept any grammar rule at all at that point. Many people use run-on sentences and many don't capitalize the start of sentences in very casual text, even though these are widely (universally) accepted rules.

I like the aesthetic of its usage in this case and find it makes the sentence read easier. It eliminates even temporary ambiguity about part-of-speech for the final two words. It stands in for a clarifying word like "become".

To the extent it's "incorrect", it's in that it generated this discussion at all.

I completely disagree with you and find the comma misplaced in a jarring way. It interrupts the flow of thought for me in a negative way: much more than a brief pause, it places a marker that the syntax of "richer" isn't fully bound to the previous words. There's also no ambiguity in the last two words without the comma.

I think if the author wanted a "pause the sound while keeping the syntax flowing" mark, the ellipsis (...) would have done the trick much better. In my opinion, though, this sentence did not merit any pause between "rich" and "richer" since there's nothing surprising about that word.

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