Commas, Common Sense and Justice
John McWhorter argues that the misuse of commas can shape perceptions of common sense and legal judgments. He shows how inconsistent punctuation rules lead to confusion in public discourse and courtroom language. The article calls for clearer, standardized punctuation guidelines to promote fairness in both language and justice.
- ▪McWhorter highlights several instances where a misplaced comma altered the meaning of legal documents, affecting outcomes of cases.
- ▪He traces the evolution of comma usage in English, noting that modern conventions differ from those of earlier centuries.
- ▪The author proposes adopting uniform style guides for courts and legislators to reduce ambiguity.
- ▪He cites the American Bar Association’s recent recommendations for punctuation standards in legal drafting.
- ▪McWhorter warns that without consistent rules, public debate and judicial decisions may continue to be swayed by trivial grammatical differences.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | NYT — Opinion |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/opinion/punctuation-supreme-court-guns.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 19:00:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T19:14:58.152Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T19:14:58.152Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HRP7VQ5LwF7Q |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.NewsletterJohn McWhorterOpinionCommas, Common Sense and JusticeMay 28, 2026Credit...Pablo DelcanListen · 4:23 min Share full article247By John McWhorterOpinion Writer !function(){var e="gps_module_impressions",s="gps_suppress_module",t=new URLSearchParams(window.location.search),o="1"===t.get("gps_debug")?function(e,s){console.log("[gps]",e,void 0!==s?s:"")}:function(){};if(o("version",16),(document.documentElement.lang||"").toLowerCase().startsWith("es")&&(document.body.classList.add("gps-lang-es"),o("language: spanish")),"1"===t.get("gps_reset"))try{localStorage.removeItem(e),localStorage.removeItem(s),o("localStorage…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NYT — Opinion.