So I admit I rolled my eyes a little bit at the bad-punctuation outrage in the first fifty pages of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Okay, your grocer puts an apostrophe in “CARROTS” sometimes. We get it.

But yesterday I caught myself doing the same thing, but not at a neighborhood grocery or curry shop. This was a national ad campaign for Triscuits. There was Rachael Ray on the back of the Triscuits box, saying,

“Try my delicious, entertaining recipe with your family and friends!”

Nabisco, you are America’s largest non-elf-staffed cracker company. Don’t you employ proofreaders? Commas are only placed between coordinate adjectives, adjectives that modify a noun with a certain parallelism. A teacher once told me that you test two adjectives for coordinate-ness by putting an “and” between them. Instead of “the thin, tall stranger,” try “the stranger was thin and tall.” It works? Then it needs a comma.

But my teacher was wrong: that’s a lousy test. You would never put a comma in “the big white dog” even though “The dog was big and white” works just fine. The better test is to reverse the order of the adjectives: “the tall, thin stranger” still works, but “the white big dog” sounds odd.

I think what Rachael means to say is that these are delicious recipes for entertaining, not recipes that are delicious and entertaining. The recipes aren’t going to sing Gilbert and Sullivan for you, or write a little one-act play, or have you over for cocktails. “Entertaining, delicious recipes” doesn’t make sense, ergo: no comma.

I don’t blame Rachael Ray. Obviously she’s too busy running a vast media empire to write her own Triscuit blurbs. Besides, if she’d written it herself, she would have called her Triscuit Turkey Melts an “awesome, delish recipe.”

Which would take a comma.