How states are like years

Hint: It has to do with commas

Rod Kessler writes, in response to my “Hi, comma” post: “Another comma frequently omitted these days is the one after a state name: “When I was born in Brooklyn, New York[] horses occasionally dragged wagons along Broadway.”

Right you are about that missing comma, Rod. In your example sentence, New York is an appositive, and appositives that don’t end a sentence should have either two commas, one on each side, or no commas at all. (Ones that do end the sentence don’t need a comma before the period – but everybody already knows that.)

People often make the same comma mistake with years that follow dates. For instance, “When I was born on March 1, 1953[] horse-drawn wagons were a thing of the past.”

Having said that, I must admit that both states and years are exceptions to the standard pattern of using two commas for nonrestrictive appositives and none with restrictive ones. (We’re heading into the grammatical weeds here, and I’m sorry about that. Please stay tuned for a future screed about how off-putting and unintuitive grammatical terms are.)

A nonrestrictive appositive is a noun that follows another noun and adds extra information but doesn’t affect the overall meaning of the sentence. An example would be “Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, was stuffed and put on display in the Roy Rogers – Dale Evans Museum.” The point of the sentence is that Roy had his horse stuffed and displayed in his museum, and the fact that the horse’s name was Trigger doesn’t change that.

A restrictive appositive, however, is crucial to the sentence’s meaning. For instance, “The horse Mr. Ed was the title character in a sitcom that aired in the 1960s.” In this case, the point of the sentence is that a horse named Mr. Ed was the title character. Leave Mr. Ed out of that sentence and you lose most of the meaning.

But back to your “Brooklyn, New York,” sentence, Rod, and how and why state names are an exception to the rule. The Brooklyn that’s in New York is certainly the best-known one, but it shares that name with 21 other American cities and towns. So if we were following the nonrestrictive vs. restrictive rule, we would not put commas around “New York” because which Brooklyn we’re talking about is crucial to the meaning of the sentence. Similarly, in “When I was born on March 1, 1953,” we need to know when — by which year — there were no more horse-drawn wagons.

The reason to use commas with state names and years is simply that they’re conventional and convenient. It may not take us long to make sense of “New York New York” — but names like “New Scotland New York,” “Manchester-by-the-Sea Massachusetts” and “San Juan Capistrano California” would surely benefit from the addition of commas.

And as long as we Americans stick with month/day/year dates, they will always have two adjacent numerals (“March 1 1953”), which is never a good idea.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.