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In 2017, a dairy company in Maine lost a lawsuit worth five million dollars. The entire case turned on a missing comma.
State law said overtime pay was not required for: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” agricultural products.
The drivers argued: ‘packing for shipment or distribution’ means two separate activities — packing, and distributing. No overtime exemption for distribution.
The company argued: ‘packing for shipment or distribution’ means a single activity — packing, where the packing is for either shipment or distribution.
The judge looked at the sentence. No comma after ‘shipment.’ If the lawmakers had written ‘packing for shipment, or distribution,’ the drivers would lose. But they didn’t. So the drivers won.
One missing comma. Five million dollars.
When reporters asked a linguist to comment, he said: “This is the most expensive punctuation mark in human history. Imagine what a semicolon could do.”
The Oxford comma debate had, until that moment, been confined to English departments and Twitter. Now it had a body count. Or rather, a dollar count. Same thing, in a capitalism.
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