In 2014, three delivery drivers for a dairy company in Maine, in the north-east of the United States, went to court over a missing comma.
The drivers' complaint was simple. They often worked more than forty hours a week, and they believed the company owed them overtime pay. The company disagreed, and it pointed to a state law. The law listed the jobs that did not earn overtime: canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of food.
Read the end of that list slowly. Is distribution a separate job on the list? Or is the job "packing for shipment or distribution", which the drivers never did? With one more comma — packing for shipment, or distribution — the answer would be clear: distribution would be its own item, and the drivers would get nothing. Without the comma, the sentence could mean either thing.
The drivers' lawyer made one point again and again: the drivers did not pack anything; they drove trucks. The company's lawyer made the opposite point: everybody knew what the law meant.
In March 2017 a federal appeals court agreed with the drivers. The judge wrote that the law was ambiguous, and that in such a case it had to be read in the workers' favour. His opinion began with a sentence that newspapers all over the world quoted: "For want of a comma, we have this case."
The next year the company agreed to pay the drivers five million dollars.
Maine changed the law soon afterwards. The new version does not rely on commas at all. It puts a semicolon between every item on the list: canning; processing; preserving; and so on, to the end. Nobody can read it in two ways again.
Lawyers still tell this story to young colleagues, and teachers tell it to bored pupils. Its lesson fits in one line. A comma is not decoration; sometimes it is worth five million dollars.