The Best Grammar Newsletter in the World, The Standards Department, Will Discuss the Usage of Commas With Appositive Phrases This Week
And I'm appositively beaming about it
Wednesday was the Ides of March, which allowed me to post to social media one of my very favorite movie clips.
Any opportunity to make a fun Latin class reference, amirite?
This clip has nothing to do with the subject of today’s column, which is how to use commas with appositive phrases. However, I also believe that you can use “Mean Girls” references for just about anything, so I’m going to make it work.
First, what is an appositive? It’s a noun or noun phrase that renames another noun in your sentence, adding clarification or identification. Nouns and appositives or appositive phrases are in apposition to one another, meaning that they are in proximity to one another and/or that one is being applied to the other.
In “Mean Girls,” that girl cracked.
What girl? “Mean Girls,” as the title implies, is full of them.
In “Mean Girls,” that girl, Gretchen Weiners, cracked.
Aha! Gretchen Weiners is the appositive that both renames and clarifies for us who the girl is that cracked. “Girl” is the noun which needs clarification, and the subject of our sentence; “Gretchen Weiners” is the appositive renaming the noun.
Example: Gretchen Weiners had cracked.
This sentence is fine as is; it is, in fact, a direct quote from the above clip.
But I think we all know that Gretchen Weiners would prefer:
Gretchen Weiners, the girl whose father invented toaster strudel, had cracked.
Here, your appositive phrase is adding description to “Gretchen Weiners,” which acts in this sentence as your noun and is the subject of your sentence.
Now, the tricky part: Not all appositives require commas.
There are two kinds of appositives: Essential and nonessential.
And we know which one Gretchen Weiners is.
And which one Regina George is.
Essential appositives take commas, because they provide information that is critical to the sentence making sense.
The queen bee Regina George decreed that “fetch” was not going to happen.
I mean, we all know who the queen bee is (I heard she sat next to John Stamos on a plane and he told her she was pretty!). But poor Cady Heron shows up unawares and has to learn this lesson the hard way. If Cady only heard “The queen bee decreed that ‘fetch’ was not going to happen,” she probably would have thought there was an actual talking bee. Adding Regina’s name clarifies for Cady who means business.
On the other hand, if you remove a nonessential appositive from a sentence, the sentence still makes sense to everyone. For that reason, the nonessential appositive is set off by commas.
Regina and her friends, Gretchen and Karen, wear pink on Wednesdays.
Remove Gretchen and Karen’s names from the sentence, and it still makes sense. Any underlings of Regina would still wear pink on Wednesdays; Gretchen and Karen know they are nonessential employees.
I hope this episode of Comma Drama made you laugh, made you cry, and was better than “Cats.” Please like and share with your friends, and please, please subscribe!