Big payday for the nerds, and some validation

Behold the mighty comma — arguably the most common of punctuation marks, though oft misused, misunderstood and misplaced, and subject to roughly a bajillion rules — and one comma, or rather lack of a comma, just got its day in court.

Oakhurst Dairy in Portland, Maine, just settled in court to pay $5 million in back pay to its delivery drivers because of the way a state law is punctuated — and because at least five of the company’s drivers are big nerds.

Here’s the deal, Maine state law says businesses do not have to pay overtime for these duties: “the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” foods.

The drivers clearly perform distribution duties, and they have received no overtime pay because their employer said distribution is the last in a nine-item list of exempt duties.

But someone read the law and said, “Hey, does ‘packing for shipment or distribution’ describe two completely different jobs or does ‘packing’ refer to ‘shipment’ and to ‘distribution’?”

A kind of shorthand in the English language allows us to change a phrase like “packing for shipment or packing for distribution” into the shorter version of “packing for shipment or distribution.” In this interpretation of the sentence, the drivers said, the no-overtime rule does not apply to the drivers because they don’t do any packing, whether it’s for shipment or distribution.

The law would be clear if it had read “packing for shipment, or distribution” but it didn’t.

So they sued their employer for $10 million.

The judge, though, ruled that the “or” means that “packing for shipment” and “distribution” are two different tasks, and he ruled for the employer.

The drivers took the case to appellate court, and the three-judge panel said. “Y’know, those nerdy drivers do have a point here that it could be read either way.”

So the case went back to court. I wrote about the appellate decision in my column at that time because, wow, all this over a little comma argument.

It’s like that classic comma joke: the panda “eats shoots and leaves” or the panda “eats, shoots and leaves.” One comma means the difference between a panda quietly eating bamboo shoots and leaves, or the panda getting into a Wild West shootout after brunch.

This real-life debate with real-life consequences is pretty heady stuff for people who make a living off of words and using them to try to clearly convey meaning.

The rules for comma usage are, I think, the hardest of all and trying to figure them out sometimes is an exercise in insanity. Commas have a long list of rules and another long list of exceptions to the rules.

One of the hottest grammar rule debates is this: Oxford comma or not. The Oxford comma – sometimes called the serial comma to prove that nerds cannot agree on anything – is the last comma in a list of three or more. In this sentence it’s the comma before “and”: “I like bread, meat, and fruit.”

Newspaper style says no Oxford comma unless it is needed to keep the meaning clear: “I like bread, meat, and berries and cream.” The Oxford comma means that “berries and cream” is a unit, otherwise the sentence could be interpreted in a way that the speaker likes meat and berries together.

Sure, it’s weird, but without the comma – “I like bread, meat and berries and cream” – it could be true. The comma lets the reader know which pair of words is the combined unit.

That’s kind of what the lawsuit was about.

In the end, the company’s $5 million settlement is a pretty sweet payday for one comma – or lack of a comma. It also kind of validates the importance of grammar and all the debates on sentence structure, word usage, punctuation, word placement, blah, blah and blah. (Or is it “... word placement, and blah, blah and blah”? See how these things get started?)

Sadly, though, because the parties settled out of court, no one has made an official ruling on that comma thing. The debate continues in nerdville.

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Interestingly, a comma at the heart of a 2006 lawsuit in Canada meant that a company could get out of a contract early and save $2 million Canadian, which was reported to be 88 cents on the U.S. dollar at the time — still a pretty sweet comma-generated payday at [email protected].