Court Truth Doublet

Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (so help you God)?

It is wrongly punctuated. The first comma needs to be replaced by something else. The phrase is recited as a triplet, because we like triplets. Beg, borrow, or steal; fire, flood, or famine; life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineffs. They just sound nice. They are poetic.  I find myself looking for a third element frequently when I write, just because there seems a rightness to it.

But the sentiment of the oath is not really a triplet. It is a single statement, modified by a doublet. Do you swear to tell the truth? And then the modification, the explanation: the whole truth, that is, not slyly leaving out important information to create a false impression, and nothing but the truth, which is to not tell a truth but then add untrue things to it in order to deceive. Those are the two main ways that one can technically tell the truth but actually be lying.

This happened in another twinned description turned into a triplet because an editor thought it sounded better. I discussed this almost five years ago after a friend alerted me to the comma controversy in Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."  His first editor added a comma in the second position because he thought it just sounded right. Lovely, dark, and deep, that is, they are lovely and dark, and deep, all three.  But Frost's original is intentionally darker in tone. The woods are lovely - dark and deep together describe why they are lovely, because of the suggestion of escape, suicide, abdication of responsibility by leaving the path and going into the woods, perhaps forever. 

So we can try to repunctuate, but should be careful that there is seldom such a thing as "correct" punctuation, except by convention. (Which can be important, by the way. Convention helps with clarity. It also helps show off that you have read the right books or gone to the correct schools, a less attractive motive.) Such is also true of correct spelling - humor or humour? Or correct pronunciation - do we really know where the accent goes in all these dead languages when we don't have any metrical poetry? No, these are ultimately also by convention.  Necessary convention, perhaps, but they could have gone otherwise. So also, more controversially, with meanings of words. Words are also by convention - however, the necessity of convention for understanding is much stronger when we get to the meanings of words. They are all eventually arbitrary and destructible, yes. Yet it is often better to treat their meanings by the fiction that there is something permanent, or at least more permanent about them.  It is true that the word "silly" once meant "blessed," but it is also true that if you call someone that now they won't think it's a compliment, nor should they. 

So what do we put in the slot after "truth?" A question mark works, and has the necessary power, though it creates a sentence fragment after. A colon, semicolon, and a dash all work as well, though they sap energy away from that stark tell the truth, full stop, phrase.