Picture an interrogation room with a single chair under a bright light. On that chair sits an apostrophe (we’d get Michael Cera to play him). He’s covered in flop sweat, trying to answer investigators’ questions about where he was during Joe Biden’s Zoom call with Latino voters.
Sorry, that’s just me imagining the movie version of last week’s silliest election scandal, which improbably hinged on whether Biden did or did not intend to use an apostrophe in some recent comments. Biden was speaking about Donald Trump’s misbegotten late-October rally in Madison Square Garden, which featured a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe’s riff calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” In his confusing way, he was trying to say that the only garbage as far as he was concerned was the demonization of Latinos, but thanks to the built-in ambiguity of the spoken apostrophe, it’s also possible to interpret what he said as labeling all Trump voters garbage—it technically depends on whether he meant supporters, supporters’, or supporter’s. Naturally, Republicans jumped at the opportunity to turn this slight hiccup into this year’s version of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” scandal, with J.D. Vance calling Biden’s remarks “disgusting.” At least a few of his compatriots were ready to launch an investigation over it. If these people could subpoena the apostrophe, they would. (Confusingly, Vance himself decided Monday night was a good time to call Kamala Harris “trash.”)
It’s all very dumb, and even though Trump’s garbage-truck stunt seems to have backfired, Democrats are worried the apostrophe catastrophe could overshadow Kamala Harris’ final pitch to voters. But from another standpoint, it makes perfect sense. This is a fitting culmination for what has been a strangely punctuation-obsessed election season.
Since way before one little apostrophe briefly became the election’s main character, Harris has been using a very specific shortcut to explain how to pronounce her first name. As she likes to say, it’s comma, like the punctuation mark (the apostrophe’s upside-down twin), then la. Her campaign has taken this explanation—which was necessary for the millions of Americans who never learned to say her name during her vice presidency, unfortunately—and run with it, sending her great-nieces onstage at the Democratic National Convention in August to share the handy mnemonic device far and wide. It’s also led to merch: I screamed when I saw Scandal actor Tony Goldwyn rocking a hat featuring a single, beguiling comma next to the letters L and A on it in August, a design I’ve since seen all over the place.
It’s not just that commas happen to be a useful way to get across the pronunciation of Harris’ first name; Harris seems to have fully embraced them as a symbol. I might go so far as to say she feels a spiritual affinity with the comma? People like the sound of their own name; it’s not a huge leap to imagine that Harris would extend that positive association to a punctuation mark that sounds like her name. Beyond that, commas suit Harris’ speaking style: They’re conversational, a little loquacious, occasionally discursive. In the middle of one of her trademark phrases—“What can be, unburdened by what has been”—you will of course find a load-bearing comma. Maybe I’m reading too much into things here, but her office softball team in her Senate days was called the Oxford Kamalas. I can see commas appealing to the same part of her that is an avowed fan of Venn diagrams.
The election’s punctuation preoccupation doesn’t end with Harris’ enthusiasm for commas, though. In August, when Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, several news outlets ran articles about the grammar geek implications of it all. A ticket containing two names whose endings rendered them hard to make possessive—how would the world cope? The New York Times called it an apostrophe battle, but in retrospect, I guess it was just the first salvo in the apostrophe war.
Another apostrophe incident followed in September. Some people purporting to be related to Walz—the governor later identified them as second cousins—came out as Trump supporters. They did so by being photographed wearing shirts that read “Walz’s for Trump.” This, as most grammar sticklers know, is not the correct way to pluralize a last name (though it is a strangely persistent way of getting it wrong); it should have been Walzes for Trump. It was the perfect fodder for any Democrat looking for a reason to feel smug: Trump supporters don’t know basic grammar, and here was proof. Enthusiasm for punctuation can be endearing, but the risk of being pedantic is always there too.
It would be reductive to say that Democrats are the party of proper punctuation and Republicans are the party of “punctuating however: they want!” But it’s also very true that the current leader of the latter party has never been any sort of champion of grammar. Trump is at least creative with it: Just a few days ago, he put his own name in quotation marks on Truth Social, a decision I’m still scratching my head over. Meanwhile, you’d think that J.D. Vance, a man who uses his initials in place of a first name, would have a more personal relationship with periods than most. You’d be wrong: Some reporting has indicated that Vance explicitly prefers to be called “JD” over “J.D.”—as Vanity Fair joked, we already knew he had a problem with people who get their periods, but what does he have against periods themselves? Given these antipunctuation sentiments at the top of the party, it’s not that surprising that Republicans seem interested in punctuation only when it can be used as a tool to own the libs.
There are many more important reasons for supporting Harris over the Republican ticket, but that she has aligned herself with punctuation when Trump and Vance seem hostile to it doesn’t hurt. Commander in chief? Make that comma nerd in chief.
