Steve Breeze popped into my last post and muttered something about the serial or “Oxford” comma which was, until shortly after I read that comment, missing from the blog title. It’s a bone of contention, this penultimate comma in a list of things.
For example, is it “The grocer had carrots, rutabagas, and celery,” or “The grocer had carrots, rutabagas and celery”? Which is right? Not even copyeditors agree. For me, even though I can get emotional about some punctuational issues (if the grocer has carrot’s and rutabaga’s, I will take my business elsewhere), this one is like gun control: an issue about which I am able to take sides to the satisfaction of the divided majority. I can see both sides, and am OK either way. Take the comma or leave it.
But it seems like this is a critical question that will affect the success of this blog and the fates of us all, so please weigh in. I will play the winner. Make your arguments below.
I am pro-Oxford comma. Otherwise, your mushrooms and mambas seem to chummy, like they’re excluding mud out of spite.
Where did the other commas go to college? Wessex Public Institution for the Lower Classes?
Komma Klown Kollege. Duh.
Unfortunate initials, has that college.
I’m British, what else can I say? I went to a school where at age twelve we spent our time parsing sentences. My English teacher was a stickler for correctly punctuating sentences. She, however, was also inspiring. I still remember forty years later the ways she screamed one day, “You have no fire of poetry in your damp little minds!” It has been my goal for all of those forty years to prove her wrong.
We should loath her for her treatment of children, but is it wrong to want the fire of poetry to exist in the damp little minds of children?
“I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”
And that is why serial commas need to exist.
AP Style excluded them to conserve column inches, and a worse grammatical decision was never made. Lack of a serial comma destroys the meaning and comprehensibility of sentences.
Second-worst grammatical decision: not splitting infinitives, based on the idea that Latin was the end-all, be-all of grammar and their conventions should be English’s. Unfortunately for us, Latin infinitives are single words (portare) and unable to be split, unlike English’s two-word infinitives (to carry). After all, “How not to do things” is very different from “how to not do things.”
“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook.” Is Betty a maid or not?
It’s all situational. And people have to be pretty creative to come up with the situations that make a difference (and yeah, you can usually recast the sentence to avoid the ambiguity anyway; “I’d like to thank Ayn Rand, God and my parents.”
Brava! This comment wins. The refusal to split infinitives has left the sticklers without one of the great possibilities of English, a language far more diverse and artful than Latin ever was.
Don’t you mean, “than was ever Latin?”
Sorry, Kurtis, but as long as quibbling is in order, I think you meant “loathe,” and not “loath” (which is a noun meaning “reluctant.”)
If any of your readers don’t know this book, I recommend it for the sake of amusement, and possibly for the validation of a punctuation obsession:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Duly noted. I backed and forth with the e, saw spell check liked it either way, and figured that was good enough for me. I am loath to pass the blame; I loathe that.
BTW after I voted, I realized that I liked “What is the name of this blog?” as the name of the blog, but your survey wouldn’t accept a second suggestion.
One of my friends had a blog called “I’ll name this later.”
Too. Too chummy. Not to. Good grief. One of those days, I’m telling you.
I noted that and halfway wondered if you’d done it on purpose.
It belongs here, here, back there and not before “and,” in that “and” takes the place of the final comma.
However, I do find the “I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God” example to be hilarious. I’d absolutely double the “and” in that situation for the sake of clarity. (still chuckling)