An odd word order

A colleague encountered a sentence in a direct quote that puzzled him. Here is the sentence: “Tuition people understand because it goes to things we need,” Cameron said. “Athletic fees do not.”

The first part “tuition people understand” seemed to my colleague to need commas so that readers would pause after “tuition.” But in the end he couldn’t decide if commas were right there. He was right to leave the commas out.

That sentence used a word order that we don’t often hear or read in English: Object Subject Verb. We use Subject Verb Object most often, although, as in that sentence above, we vary the word order to put the emphasis in a different place. The odd word order reminds us of speakers who have adopted English as a second language and who are still learning the syntax and grammar. I think of the old dialect comedians who mixed German, Yiddish, Italian or some other language with English, and one piece I read on Wikipedia pointed out the word order of Yoda, the Jedi teacher in the “Star Wars” movies: Much to learn you still have.

But no matter what order the words are in, we do not separate the subject from the verb with a comma (unless we have intervening phrases or clauses) and we don’t separate the verb from the object with a comma (unless phrases or clauses intervene).

This article was originally posted by the Raleigh News & Observer, a subsidiary of The McClatchy Co.; is posted here to provide continuity; and is copyright © 2011 The News & Observer Publishing Company, which reserves the right to remove this post.