Why We Sometimes Really Need Commas with Adjectives!
On Sundays, Maya Sciarretta, a really-very-cool lady uses the back kitchen at my weekend job to make huge batches of tomato sauce. When there’s extra, we get some, and it’s the best. The other day, she was making a batch of her puttanesca. I took this photo of the olives she’d bought from food supplier Italissima.
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These are “Broken Pitted Ripe Olives.” I stopped in my tracks, my heart pumping slightly faster than its usual rate. I felt like a mid-size jungle cat catching the scent of possible prey.
“Maya,” says I, “are these cans full of broken pits? Like, horrible little shards that will rip up the insides of our mouths and break our teeth?”
She assured me that no, there were no pit shards. The olives were broken, the olives were pitted, and the olives were ripe. But without commas, “broken pitted” becomes ambiguous: is it the pits that are broken, or is it the olives? (And with “broken” and “pitted” on the same line, I imagine that this reading would suggest itself to non-editors, too.) I could imagine that extra olives full of pit shards would be scraped off whatever production line and marketed at a cheap price to thrifty, patient saucemakers willing to strain their product.
The problem arises from “broken” seeming to modify pitted—making it a cumulative adjective, which would not take a comma—rather than olives. However, the can doesn’t include a comma after “pitted” either, so it seems as if whoever named these olives chose not to/did not know how to apply the rule at all.
Of course this could easily be cleared up by a comma after broken and one after pitted to designate the adjectives as coordinate—that is to say, modifying only “olives” and not the other adjectives. I can imagine, however, that Italissima may have decided that commas had no place in the name of a food product. If they were dead-set on not including commas, and didn’t care about giving grammarians headaches, they could have, at LEAST, arranged the adjectives so as to cause the least amount of confusion: “pitted ripe broken olives,” while technically incorrect, is unambiguous.
There’s a simple trick (for native speakers, at least) to test whether an adjective is coordinate, and thus in need of a comma. Try slotting an “and” between a pair of adjectives. If it slips in without changing the meaning (“broken and pitted,” changes the meaning of “broken pitted”) or making things sound awkward (like “large and blue house”), then it’s coordinate. If not, it’s cumulative. The adjectives in “large blue house” are cumulative. The adjectives in “rhythmic grammar advice” are cumulative. The adjectives in “broken, pitted olives” are coordinate (in this case).
F.Y.I Here is a huge, gigantic, overwhelming, helpful list of adjectives: http://www.momswhothink.com/reading/list-of-adjectives.html#Adjectives List
