How Many Wives Does One Man Need?

The Grammopticon received this query via email:

Dear All-knowing One,
Was just reading a Times article and came across this sentence:
"Just three years earlier, his wife, Mary, said, a scan of his abdomen had been clear."
Am I right that the comma following the phrase “his wife” implies that he has more than one wife?

(Note the salutation: guaranteed to earn my affection and prompt reply. It's not pandering; it's showing respect.) My reply:

No, the commas around “Mary” are correct. If there weren’t commas, that would imply more than one wife. The commas set off the info that could be omitted without losing essential information--”his wife” is a particular person, whether or not you know what her name is. If the author said “his wife Mary,” that implies you need the name—he wants you to know he’s talking about the wife named Mary, not the wife named, say, Susan.

This is a common question and a common mistake, in cases like this one but also in situations involving job titles. Which of these is correct?

Jane Doe, the senator from Utah, led the panel.
The panel was led by Utah senator, Jane Doe.

Here, both sentences are giving us the same information--but, grammatically speaking, the first one is correct and the second one is not. "Huh?" you say? (Inarticulately, I might add.) Let me explain a little concept called apposition.

Apposition, or an appositive, means two nouns or noun phrases placed adjacent to each other, one modifying the other. The term comes from the Latin, I am told, ad positio, meaning "near position." Commas set off the modifying phrase if it is non-restrictive--if the sentence would be equally clear and equally meaningful without that phrase. If you can cross out everything between the commas and still know what you need to know, the commas belong; if the information between the commas is essential to narrow something down, it's the commas that go.

Let's try this test on our examples, first our wise correspondent's example from the Times.

Just three years earlier, his wife, Mary, said, a scan of his abdomen had been clear.

Get rid of everything in red and our sentence still makes perfect sense, and unless the unnamed gentleman is a polygamist, or perhaps has been married more than once--although in this sentence one would probably be explicit about the "former" status of the wife unless it had been clarified in preceding sentences--we don't need to know the wife's first name to be able to identify the precise person who said that the scan had been clear.

Now, let's put our two Senator Doe examples to the test:

Jane Doe, the senator from Utah, led the panel.
The panel was led by Utah senator, Jane Doe.

In the first, just as with the Times example, we don't necessarily have to know Ms. Doe's title or state she represents to identify her as the person who led the panel. The additional information is desirable (which is why it's there--pointless words are just a waste of perfectly good letters, and the Grammopticon abhors waste), but not necessary to narrow down the possible candidates for leader of the panel. The commas belong.

If your education in civics was adequate, you know that Utah, like every U.S. state, has two senators; over the course of history, many more than two people have represented Utah in the Senate. Therefore, eliminating everything in red in the second sentence would not leave enough information to walk up and point to the precise individual who led the panel. We need Jane Doe's name in order to rule out any other person who might be the Utah senator leading the panel. So get rid of the comma.

Of course if other context--preceding text--had already told us that Jane Doe was the only Utah senator present at the panel (e.g., "The group included Senator Jane Doe of Utah, Senator Jill Jones of Illinois, Representative John Smith of Arkansas, and Governor Jim Q. Public of New Hampshire."), we wouldn't need her name here. We would need "the" to make clear that it's the one who's a senator from Utah who's in charge: "The panel was led by the Utah senator." Note: still no comma.

In summary:

apposition = next to each other
commas = additional but not vital information

All of grammar should be so simple.