September 25, 2008


Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

Punctuation Man, that’s who.

(I climbed to Dharamsala, too.)

posted by Christopher Walken in education, grammar, language, music, writing 

comments

6 Responses to “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”

  1. Cindy Scroggins on September 26th, 2008 at 9:32 am

    I am very much with Punctuation Man on the serial comma.

    That is all.

  2. Cooper Renner on September 26th, 2008 at 10:24 am

    I have no great feeling one way or the other on the serial comma, but on the comma in general I have mighty feelings. Contemporary writing of all sorts is woefully deficient in commas, which serve to indicate not only pauses, but also groups of words which need to be seen as units within themselves, apart from the rest of the sentence. Long live the comma!

  3. carlos moreno on September 26th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    i have had to deal w/ debates on this over the last few weeks, defining a copyediting/writing style for a magazine that i work for. people do care. and they’re very passionate about their convictions. i for one am a huge fan of the serial comma. …but there are times when it CREATES more ambiguity in a sentence than it takes away, which is the point of some people who want to do away with it.

  4. Mike Dresser on September 26th, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    I generally avoid grammatical nit-picking…however…this morning’s much expected email from our CEO regarding financial belt tightening began:

    Dear, Colleague’s
    I am well aware of the financial situation…

    Troubling developments from upstairs.

  5. Michael Smith on September 27th, 2008 at 10:05 am

    Your CEO’s Admin just got fired.

  6. India on October 5th, 2008 at 11:58 am

    @Carlos: I can’t think of any instance in which a serial comma creates confusion—except when it’s misused, in a series that should instead have serial semicolons. I’d be interested to see an example in which your colleagues think it increases ambiguity.

    Much, much more common are instances in which the lack of a serial comma forces the reader to back up and reparse the sentence. That annoys the fuck out of me.

    Omitting the serial comma also reduces the writer’s capacity for precision. My favorite example is from Frost. As Robert Hass pointed out in one of his Poet’s Choice columns a zillion years ago,

    The woods are lovely, dark and deep

    is a very different statement from

    The woods are lovely, dark, and deep

    In a world without serial commas, that distinction is inexpressible.

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