A New Form of Comma Abuse?

Two unusual syntax errors in the past week have me curious about their origin and what it might mean.

I’m not going to identify the source because my intent is not to name and shame anyone involved; I just want to think in public about it. These errors were so jarring to me that when I returned to the site today to take screenshots, I was surprised that neither had been corrected.

For a while, it was trendy among some content creators [ugh] to focus on the implicit rules of English syntax, which most native speakers follow without problems but give nonnative users fits. One popular topic is the order of and punctuation for a sequence of adjectives. Grammarist’s article titled “Order of Adjectives — Rules, Chart” is a concise, informational piece. The writers and/or editor(s) of the two pieces my examples come from would do well to read it.

One thing the Grammarist piece doesn’t explicitly address is that commas can also shift the meaning of modifiers. That’s the crux of the goofs I’m focusing on. Here’s the first:

Adding the comma shifts both the meaning of the word “bright” and what it modifies. In the usual construction of an adjective phrase like this, there’s no comma, and it’s understood that “bright” is modifying the color “red,” giving the reader information about its brilliance. With the comma, “bright” is read as modifying the noun—which is what halted my reading. Superman’s boots are intelligent? How did that come about? Why are we only learning about it now?

The second example adds an interesting twist:

In this case, the comma changes the meaning of “long” from an adverb modifying “lost” to an adjective modifying “dad”. Neat trick! And since English generally uses “height” to signify vertical measurements, I was really confused for a second.

Both of these examples are from the same website; however, the articles were written by two different authors. That led me to suspect that a copy editor or proofreader was responsible for inserting the errant commas… and I’m not sure which hurts worse: that a writer or an editor at a well-known, American journalism website could make such obvious mistakes. It wasn’t until I started writing this piece that another, already tired possibility occurred to me: Maybe the culprit is an LLM or some other AI tool.

UGH.