Milkmen deliver the punctuation scandal we’ve been waiting for.

It is part of the woolly lore of editors and lawyers alike: the misplaced or absent comma in a statute or a contract that ends up costing somebody zillions of dollars. There really are not many examples of this happening, but lawyers have a responsibility to behave as though the danger were omnipresent. The thought of a comma disaster encourages close attention to detail: it provides a spur to the spirit during long hours of copy-editing.

As for print editors, believing in the myth of the expensive punctuation mark imparts a hypothetical cash value, even a heroic dignity, to the fussiness they probably acquired in toilet training.

The thing about text errors in the law is that natural language is highly redundant. You can transpose letters in a sentence or word, sow punctuation randomly, leave out the vowels: what’s left will ordinarily still convey the intended meaning. Errors induced by chance rarely create true ambiguity. when they go beyond 40 hours of work in a week. Some classes of worker, however, are exempted from this statutory requirement for overtime pay. This includes food producers and transporters, whose work hours fluctuate from week to week as retail demand changes and products face spoilage.

“Exemption F” in Maine’s overtime law defines these unprotected workers as being involved in:

“The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; (3) Perishable foods.”

Like the fig importers of 1872, delivery drivers for the Oakhurst Dairy Co., a renowned Maine firm, noticed something fishy about this list in 2014. Are “packing for shipment” and “distribution” separate items? Or is “packing for shipment or distribution” one item? If it is the latter, well, truckers have nothing to do with packing, and they must be owed some unpaid overtime by the dairy — more than US$10 million, by their reckoning.

If the writers of the regulation meant for “packing” and “distribution” to be separate things, the famous “serial comma” that divides the world of editors and writers could (and should) have been introduced after the word “shipment.” In that case, all would have been clear. Unfortunately, the old style guide for Maine legislators recommends against the use of the serial comma. So the U.S. District Court for Maine, which was called upon to adjudicate the problem last week, has no idea whether that comma was left out for stylistic reasons or for logical ones.

This is certain to cost somebody money. A local court initially thought the dairy had the better of the argument: the bosses argued that “shipment” and “distribution” are the same darn thing and that there is no reason for both words to be in the regulation unless “distribution” is meant to be distinguished from “packing.” But the delivery drivers, appealing a summary judgment to the federal court, objected to this. “Shipment,” they said, means passing food to a boat or a train, while “distribution” is bringing it to warehouses and retailers for sale.

There were other linguistic wrinkles in the argument, but the District Court ended up flinging its hands in the air, accepting that the law contains an irresolvable ambiguity. The argument, it said repeatedly and explicitly, is “a tie.” And Maine’s rules for interpreting labour laws say that laws “should be liberally construed to further (their) beneficent purposes”.

In baseball, umpires are sometimes said to observe an unwritten rule that “a tie goes to the baserunner” rather than to an infielder trying to put him out. In the labour law of Maine, a tie goes to the worker, not the boss. But the majestic Battle of the Missing Comma is not over: it will now go back to the state court for a full trial or a settlement there.