Cats & Commas: A Joke That Costs Companies Millions When Nobody Gets It

What is the difference between a cat and a comma?  One has claws at the end of its paws; the other is a pause at the end of a clause.

The joke works because it exploits homophonic wordplay, “claws” and “clause” sharing identical pronunciation while carrying entirely different meanings.  It is a clever piece of construction; built on the same mechanism every good pun relies on: forcing the listener to hold two meanings simultaneously and watch them collide.  Most people laugh, forget it within the hour, and move on with their lives never once considering what happens when the comma at the end of that clause goes missing in a document that actually matters.

The Five-Million-Dollar Sentence

In 2014, three truck drivers sued Oakhurst Dairy, based in Portland, Maine, seeking more than four years of unpaid overtime.  Maine’s overtime law exempted employers from paying overtime to workers involved in “the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” certain perishable goods.  Notice the absence of a comma before “or distribution of.”  Without it, the sentence could be read two ways: either packing for shipment and distribution were both separately exempt activities, or “packing for shipment or distribution” was a single combined exempt activity, meaning distribution alone, without packing, was not covered.

United States Court of Appeals Judge David J. Barron opened his twenty-nine-page ruling with a sentence that deserves to be carved into the wall of every legal drafting office in the world: “For want of a comma, we have this case.”  The First Circuit ruled the ambiguity had to be resolved in the drivers’ favour, since Oakhurst Dairy’s own drivers distributed the products but did not pack them.  The company settled in 2018 for five million dollars, paid out to more than 120 drivers.  Maine’s legislature responded by rewriting the statute entirely, replacing the disputed comma-separated list with semicolons, presumably so that no future court would ever again have to build a twenty-nine-page argument around a single missing punctuation mark.

Why the Joke and the Lawsuit are the Same Lesson

Punctuation is not decorative.  It is structural, in the same load-bearing sense a claw is structural to a cat’s grip.  Oakhurst Dairy’s lawyers presumably know this now, at considerable cost.  Everyone else still treating the comma as an optional flourish should take the lesson for free, while it remains available at that price.

---

Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters