In response to my column last week, “No, we shouldn’t ever stop learning English grammar,” reader Gerson Palomo posted this question on punctuation usage: “What I learned from school is that the comma (,) should not be placed before the word ‘and.’ Am I right?”

I replied to Gerson that it depends on the usage and the intended sense. For instance, there’s no need for a comma before “and” in a two-item compound subject like this: “Tina and Larry bumped at each other at the park during a heavy downpour.” But a comma is perfectly in order in a compound sentence like this: “I arrived two hours late, and only then did I realize that I was mistaken about the time of our meeting.”

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