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I'm a bit fuzzy on the logic but I think it has more to do with little modifying old lady, while both tall and slender modify lady. In other words, old and lady are so closely associated that they *are the noun. Likewise, I would not use a comma with large brown dog. I'm not explaining this very well; need to find a punctuation guide that (1) agrees with me  and (2) clarifies why. EDIT: This - http://snipurl.com/a0nm - helps some; scroll down to #6 and continue with #1 under Misusing Commas.
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little, old lady
You can rephrase it as a lady who is both little and old, but little old lady is something of a frozen idiom. It's almost an irreversible binomial, as it sounds strange to say an old, little lady, but slightly better to say an old and little lady ~ a lady who is both old and little.
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Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail - Robert A. Hall Jr.'s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first hardcover vanity press edition (Linguistica-Ithaca, NY). Congratulations Wordwind, your final form of Tillie's sentence had only one major error, namely... USE A DASH INSTEAD OF A COLON WHEN THE SIGN IS SIMPLY A SUBSTITUTE FOR "NAMELY".
A COLON SUGGESTS AN INCONGRUITY WHILE A DASH IS MORE CONGRUENT.
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I'll happily disagree, Milo. I never heard anything on earth, other than in what I read above, about a colon suggesting an incongruity. And for everybody here, here's what Holden Caulfield observes about commas and beyond: That's something else that gives me a royal pain. I mean if you're good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas. Stradlater was always doing that. He wanted you to think that the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. He was a little bit like Ackley that way. I once sat next to Ackley at this basketball game. We had a terrific guy on the team, Howie Coyle, that could sink them from the middle of the floor, without even touching the backboard or anything. Ackley kept saying, the whole goddam game, that Coyle had a perfect build for basketball. God, how I hate that stuff.
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I think I'd put a dash as a substitute for "namely" there too.
I was taught that you put a colon when you make a list and a semi-colon when the next part of the sentence is distinct from the first part but still an integral part of it.
Does anybody have an AP writing guide?
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>put a colon when you make a list
and a list of one doesn't qualify??
- ron (suggested by joe friday's The Slippery Slope of Punctuation) obvious
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Is it a list if it's only one item?
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I guess I'm sure I really don't know -- if you sit down to make a to-do list for the day and you only write one thing, what do you have?
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...if you sit down to make a to-do list for the day and you only write one thing, what do you have?The same thing that you have if you have nothing on your to-do list to do. Is a list with nothing on it still a list? It is - only - if you persist in calling it a list. But we digress.
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I've got a quick question for the prescriptivistsDear jheem, I wonder why anyone who is not a "prescriptivist" would want to consult a "prescriptivist" on the use of commas? Anyone who wishes to make oneself clear to a reader will use commas judiciously, and they don't have to become slaves of "custom" to do so. In fact, they don't even have to be aware of such "customs" to do so. Writers who are attentive to their audience display such attentiveness in everything they write, not just in the use of commas. "Prescriptivists" generally are unaware of that. That's why they are generally pretty good at inserting commas in other people's sentences, but not much good at constructing their own sentences.
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