Comma coma

     I saw a quote by Oscar Wilde that made me laugh. It read differently on websites so I tried to run down its origins, and I found this post on several sites that summed it up. It came from Robert Harborough Sherard's book, Oscar Wilde: The Story and an Unhappy Friendship, with Portraits and Facsimile Letters, “He [Wilde] related also, with much gusto, how in a country-house he had told his host one evening that he had spent the day in hard literary work, and that, when asked what he had done, he had said, 'I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma.' 'And in the afternoon?' 'In the afternoon—well, I put it back again.'”
     I can attest to the fact that the proper usage of that cute little comma is hard literary work because there are so many crazy rules involving commas. It's like trying to explain to someone why the plural of goose is geese but the plural of moose is moose or why we drive in parkways and park in driveways. I spent several hours yesterday beating my head against the wall over the use of the punctuation when it came to the word "which."
    I've been a professional writer for 24 years so there are things I do when I write that I don't necessarily think about when I do them. They come naturally, and I shouldn't second-guess myself. Yesterday, I did. I found that sometimes I put a comma in with the word "which," and sometimes, I did not. I thought I was losing my mind, but there was good reason for those pesky commas being there sometimes and not at others. It has to do with restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, and that's another story in itself. After wasting hours trying to figure out what I was doing and discovering it was correct, I snapped out of my comma coma.
     My friends call me a grammar and punctuation Nazi, and I don't deny take offense to it. I want my copy to be perfect. The greatest compliment I've received from copy editors is that I have "clean copy," meaning they don't have to do a lot of work on it. Many times my stories appear in the newspaper exactly as I have turned them in. The editor, who used to change EVERYTHING, has since moved to a different newspaper.
      I'm sure there will be someone who will point out some error. People always seem to find something. I don't do the "Oxford" comma, which involves a series of items and a comma before the word "and." The Oxford comma would come in a sentence such as "The boy wanted mashed potatoes, gravy and cornbread for supper." It would be in place after gravy, but as you see, it's not there. It's not Associated Press style, and after 24 years, it's hard to break out of a certain style.
    I suppose I could adopt the Ernest Hemingway approach and say to heck with punctuation especially commas. I had people argue with me about Hemingway. They told me he was a former newspaperman so he knew how to use proper punctuation and was making a statement. I majored in English and have been writing for 24 years. If I tried to tell anyone reading my book that I was making a statement by not putting in commas, I'm sure they'd make some statements about me - unfavorable ones, that is.
 In the English language, commas are a conundrum at times. You can't live with them, but you definitely can't live without them. If you try to live without them, you might be found writing "Don't eat Grandma!" instead of "Don't eat, Grandma."