this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
344 points (100.0% liked)
Chat
7499 readers
3 users here now
Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.": a guest list with three items.
"We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.": JFK and Stalin are the strippers.
Thank you for defending the Oxford comma. Please take this fake gold award:
Great example 😆
I like commas. It conveys the need for a pause in the mental narration taking place as I read and write.
Yeah, which is exactly why you don't need one to finish lists. It makes it sound like you forgot the last thing. "Peaches, pears... eh... and apples".
In the case of the Oxford comma it's more to distinguish between items in a list that are combined by the "and" or items in a list that are separate items. It's not used to indicate a pause in this scenario.
Amazing example
I posted this above as well, but it's very relevant to your comment.
See above. Neither of those examples is confusing at all unless the Oxford comma is optional.
The confusion is caused by the comma. No comma, you'd obviously assume nobody is dipping their toast in juice or inviting dead dictators as strippers.
But because the superfluous comma is a thing, suddenly its absence is supposedly ambiguous. I speak several languages where the comma is outright incorrect in these sentences and I assure you nobody would find these sentences confusing.
Ah, the classic pedantry.
Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you're saying.
If you're going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don't be a coward and remove the "and". How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html
But... that article says the opposite of what it says it says.
I mean, it claims that the problem was the lack of an Oxford comma (in front of and "or", rather than an "and", by the way), but the fact is the ambiguity is caused by the fact that the comma is even an option. The judge is inferring that the comma should have existed and reading the sentence that way.
Notably, if what the writers of the text meant was that "packing for shipment or distribution" is a single clause it also wouldn't have had a comma.
I can't stress this enough, the only reason that case went the way it did is that the Oxford comma exists.