A ruling by a United States federal court, from March 2017, commences with a sentence that sounds like a fable: 'For want of a comma, we have this case.' This is not a literary flourish by the judge; it is a description of the matter at hand. A group of drivers for a Maine dairy company, Oakhurst Dairy, were claiming payment for overtime hours. Whether or not they were entitled to payment depended, quite literally, upon a comma that was missing from the law.
Maine law listed the tasks exempt from overtime pay. Among them, according to the text, were the canning, processing, freezing, storage and, at the end of the list, 'packing for shipment or distribution' of food. The question was: is 'distribution' an exempt task in itself or is it part of 'packing for shipment or distribution', that is, packing either for shipment or for distribution? It seems like a grammarian's subtlety. It was a difference in money for more than one hundred families. The drivers distributed the products but did not pack them. If 'distribution' was an independent exempt task, they did not receive overtime pay. If it was only a way of packing, they did receive it because they did not pack anything.
All the ambiguity resided in an absent comma. In English, if the law had written 'packing for shipment, or distribution', with a comma before the 'or', then 'distribution' would have clearly remained as a separate task and the company would have won. Without that comma, 'shipment or distribution' could be read as a block, two destinations for the same packing, and then the drivers won. The missing comma, that comma which many style manuals consider optional and even dispensable, was the difference between two incompatible meanings of the same phrase and between receiving or not receiving payment.
Here, one must be honest and dismantle the version that circulated everywhere, which is, moreover, more interesting than repeating it. It was stated that 'a comma cost the company five million,' as if the punctuation mark had delivered the verdict on its own. That was not the case. The court did not rule based solely on the comma: it declared the sentence ambiguous and, to resolve the deadlock, applied a legal principle that exceptions to laws protecting workers must be interpreted restrictively in favour of the worker. The comma opened the doubt; the protective principle closed it. And the five million were not imposed by that ruling; they arrived later in a 2018 settlement in which the company, furthermore, admitted no liability. Reality is less tidy than the slogan, and for that reason, it teaches more: it was not the comma that decided, but what a court did with the ambiguity that the comma left open.
A text, any text, does not carry its meaning attached like a label. Meaning is produced upon reading it and, if the text is ambiguous, the reader must choose between possible interpretations. That choice has real effects in the world. The law did not state its meaning by itself. It required a court to decide which of its two readings was valid and that decision determined how much one hundred and twenty-seven people were paid. We think that laws, contracts, and instructions are clear orders that only need to be obeyed. But they are made of language and language is almost never entirely univocal. There always remains a margin where the text does not decide for itself and into that margin enters the interpreter.
This is not a problem exclusive to laws. It happens to any text that attempts to fix something once and for all. A contract between two telecommunications companies in Canada was about to cost one of them hundreds of thousands of dollars due to the position of a comma that cast doubt on whether the agreement could be terminated at any time or only at the end of each period. The same lesson: the drafter believes they have closed the meaning and a minimal mark or its absence is sufficient for the meaning to reopen and for it to be necessary to decide once again what it is.
What these cases reveal is that no text exists which interprets itself. To write is to attempt to close off meaning, to fix it, to shield it against doubt. And it is an attempt that always leaves a chink, because language is not a perfect code but a living material full of seams through which ambiguity seeps. This is why we require judges to decide what a law states, editors to decide what an author intended to convey, and so many figures whose profession is, at its core, the same: to choose, from among the meanings a text permits, which one shall prevail. That absent comma in Maine was no minor oversight. It was a reminder that between what we write and what it signifies, there is always someone deciding, and that such a decision is never neutral.
On the open conversation
This text proceeds from a verified judicial case, the 2017 ruling regarding the Oakhurst Dairy drivers, to reflect upon something that transcends the law: that a text does not carry its meaning inherently, and that when it is ambiguous, someone must decide what it signifies, with material consequences. I dismantle the popular version ('a comma cost five million'), which is false: the court declared the law ambiguous and resolved it through a principle of worker protection; the five million arrived in a subsequent settlement without an admission of liability. I distinguish the verified fact from the journalistic legend. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspectives of law, linguistics, or the theory of interpretation, this notebook remains open.
Sources
O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, judgment of 13 March 2017 (opens: 'For want of a comma, we have this case'). Clause: 26 M.R.S.A. § 664(3)(F).
Settlement of 5 million dollars for approximately 127 drivers (February 2018), without admission of liability: Bloomberg Law and ABA Journal.
Subsequent amendment of the Maine law (26 M.R.S. § 664), which reformulated the list using semicolons and changed 'distribution' to 'distributing'.
Supporting case: Rogers Communications v. Bell Aliant, CRTC (Canada), Telecom Decision 2007-75 (20 August 2007), regarding the placement of a comma in a contract. The attributed figures vary; there is no single confirmed amount.
Regarding the serial or 'Oxford comma': Merriam-Webster.