What’s the Big Deal About Ain’t?

Section 6.52 in the Spotlight

The seventeenth edition of CMOS was the first edition to rule explicitly on whether “too” in the adverbial sense of “also” should be set off by commas. The rule applies also to “either,” which as an adverb can play a similar role in a sentence or clause.

The short answer is that commas are unnecessary but occasionally helpful for emphasis or clarity. We can find out what this means in practice—and why having a rigid rule isn’t a good idea—by starting with a simple example.

The first edition of the Manual, published in 1906, may not have addressed “too” or “either” by name, but it did have something to say about such words. Paragraph 132 ended with a suggestion that commas should not be used “ordinarily with such terms as ‘perhaps,’ ‘also,’ ‘likewise,’ etc.”—and offered a few examples in support of this.

Here’s the last one: “He was a scholar and a sportsman too.” Note the absence of any comma. And though it wasn’t featured in the examples, the word “either” would play the same role in such a sentence rewritten in the negative: “He wasn’t a scholar or a sportsman either.”

Whatever else you might think of that ancient example from the first edition, it does provide the basis for a rule—or in this case a sort of nonrule.

What Was That Rule Again?

Some people have tried to argue that whether to set off “too” (or “either”) depends on its relationship to the words in the sentence. According to this argument, a comma would be required in our original example if “too” applied to “sportsman” but not if it applied to the subject “He” (or to the sentence as a whole).

Or is it the other way around?

That’s a serious question, because such a rule would require an agreement between writers and readers on precisely how to interpret the presence or absence of a comma.

Let’s say there is such an agreement. Then the following sentence—with a comma before “too”—would mean that the subject “She” (let’s bring the answer into the twenty-first century) is not only a scholar but also an athlete, with the emphasis on “athlete”:

She is a scholar and an athlete, too.

Applying the same logic, removing the comma would alter the meaning. Without the comma, some previously mentioned other person or persons are scholars and athletes, and “She,” like that person or those people, is also a scholar and an athlete, with the emphasis on “She”:

She is a scholar and an athlete too.

You could extend this logic to “either” by rewriting the sentence in the negative: “She wasn’t a scholar or an athlete either.” That would put the emphasis on “She”; adding a comma would move the emphasis to “athlete”: “She wasn’t a scholar or an athlete, either.”

Makes sense, right? Yes, maybe—except there is no such agreement.

Context Is Everything

When it comes to making meaning, context is almost always more important than commas. This is particularly true with “too” and “either.” If your sentence is not entirely clear from context alone, revise until it is.

In the following example, it’s clear from context that “too” refers to “athlete”:

Maria’s academic achievements are well known, but she also excelled at track and field. Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

When it comes to making meaning, context is almost always more important than commas.

But in this example of dialogue, the context makes it clear that “too” refers back to “Maria”:

“All my eleven kids got perfect grades while excelling at sports.”

“Maria was a scholar and an athlete too,” I reminded her, making a plug for my daughter.

In either case, a comma would have made no appreciable difference to the meaning, which is predetermined in both examples by the context.* (Again, you can make the examples negative to test “either.”)

Italics and Word Order

Where emphasis is important, and you don’t want to leave it to context alone, one option is to apply italics. Italics will help readers decode the intended meaning, or at least the intended emphasis. Add commas to the following examples if you like, but they won’t change the meaning of either version.

Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

Another option that works well with “too” (but rarely with “either”) is to shift the placement of the adverb. In the following example, it is obvious that “too” applies to Maria:

Maria too was a scholar and an athlete.

Commas lend an additional dimension to this sentence:

Maria, too, was a scholar and an athlete.

Those commas, by drawing attention to the word “too,” emphasize the rhetorical shift implied by that word. Especially when “too” occurs midsentence, such commas may add a bit of clarity also.

Summing It Up

Some writers follow a simple rule: use commas with “too” and “either.” And because such commas don’t have the power to determine the intended meaning all by themselves, this approach is fine. Editors working with authors whose style depends on frequent, well-placed commas (in what is sometimes called close rather than open punctuation) should query before simply removing them.

But in general, Chicago favors a relatively spare, open approach to commas, omitting many commas that aren’t necessary for comprehension—including commas with “too” and “either.”

If that’s you too, then you won’t need those commas either.

In sum, the key to deciding when to use commas with “too” and “either”—and the spirit of the rule in section 6.52—is to leave them out by default. Then add them only rarely if at all—and only where a bit of extra emphasis or clarity seems warranted.

* It may go without saying, but the functionally similar word “also” is almost never set off by commas: “She was a scholar and an athlete also.” This is perhaps the strongest argument for not requiring commas with “too” and “either.”

By Geoff Nunberg

Leigh Wells/Ikon Images/Getty Images

Are people starting sentences with “so” more frequently than ever or are we just noticing it more?

To listen to the media tell it, “so” is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls “so” the new “um” and “like”; others call it a plague and a fad.

It’s like a lot of other grammatical fixations: Not everybody cares about it, but the ones who do care care a whole lot. When NPR’s Weekend Edition asked listeners last year to pick the most-misused word or phrase in the language, that sentence-initial “so” came in in second place, right behind “between you and I” and ahead of venerable bugbears like misusing “literally” and confusing “who” and “whom.” That’s a meteoric rise for a peeve that wasn’t even on the radar a decade ago.

NPR itself has been singled out for overuse of “so” by both interviewees and hosts. That prompted the NPR head of standards and practices to calculate how many times the hosts and reporters on the major NPR news programs had started sentences with “so” in a single week in August of 2014. When the total came to 237, he urged them to look for alternatives.

But not so fast. When you break that weekly figure down, it only comes to one sentence beginning with “so” every eight or 10 minutes. That isn’t actually very many, particularly when you’re running a lot of interviews. After all, “so” is a conversational workhorse. It announces a new topic, it connects causes to results, it sets up a joke. “So, what’s it like being Justin Bieber?” “So, do the low interest rates help farmers?” “So three gastroenterologists walk into a bar.”

Starting sentences with “so” isn’t a trend or a thing. However it may strike you, people aren’t doing it any more frequently than they were 50 or 100 years ago. The only difference is that back then nobody had much of a problem with it. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins sat down with him to go over the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, he didn’t say: “Scott — this last line. ‘So, we beat on, boats against the current’ etc. etc.? I think we need to go with ‘thus.’ “

So, why the recent hue and cry about those sentences beginning with “so”? In part, you could blame the quirk of perception I think of as the Andy Rooney effect, where you suddenly become keenly aware of a common word that’s always been part of the conversational wallpaper. Somebody says, “Have you noticed how everybody’s saying ‘OK’ before they hang up the phone?” and all at once the word starts jumping out at you, even though people have been using it that way forever.

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …” If that “so” were a chapter title in a Victorian novel, it would read, “In which it is explained what the reader must know before his question can be given a proper answer.”

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The Curious Listener: ‘So,’ Is This A Fad?

Scientists have been using that backstory “so” among themselves since the 1980s, but its recent spread is probably due to the tech boom. In his 2001 book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis noted that programmers always started their answers with “so.” That’s around the time when I first heard it, working at a Silicon Valley research center. Mark Zuckerberg answers questions with “so” all the time: “So, it comes down to the economics …” “So one of the services that the government wanted to include …” But by now that backstory “so” is endemic among members of the explaining classes — the analysts, scientists and policy wonks who populate the Rolodexes of CNBC and The PBS NewsHour.

To my ear, that backstory “so” is merely a little geeky, but it rouses some critics to keening indignation. A BBC host says speakers use it to sound important and intellectual. A columnist at Fast Company warns that it undermines your credibility. A psychologist writes that it’s a weasel word that people use to avoid giving a straight answer.

That’s a lot to lay on the back of a little blue-collar conjunction like “so.” But that backstory “so” can stand in for people’s impatience with the experts who use it. When you hear a labor economist or computer scientist begin an answer with “so,” they’re usually telling us that things are more complicated than we thought, and maybe more complicated than we really want to know. That may be why they were called in in the first place, but as Walter Lippmann once said, the facts exceed our curiosity.

That backstory “so” puts me on guard, too, even when I hear it coming out of my own mouth. Usually it just introduces some background qualification that the question calls out for, as in, “So … German isn’t actually a romance language.” But sometimes it announces some nugget of specialized linguistic knowledge that I feel the need to share. If that “so” were a chapter title in a Victorian novel, it would read, “In which the reader is asked, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ “