I was pointed toward the entry on “Grammar” at Stuff White People Like and saw a link to the Wikipedia on the Oxford Comma, a term I’ve never heard before. Turns out it’s nothing more than the serial comma, the thing that makes the difference between
sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll
and
sex, drugs and rock n’ roll,
which is to say, anal.
But this paragraph inspired some kind of weird glee:
There is no consensus among writers or editors on the use of the serial comma. It is closer to being standard use in American English than it is in British English (see extended treatment of this below, including a survey of published recommendations in Usage and subsequent sections). In Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian and Spanish the serial comma is not normally used but may be where this aids clarity or prosody.
BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T USE THE SERIAL COMMA! IN THE ARTICLE ABOUT THE SERIAL COMMA! And that’s hilarious, apparently.
The value of the serial comma is best shown with this example:
“I’d like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.”
versus
“I’d like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”
We were once called out for not using it in our title! But while I like the Oxford comma, we were quoting a source that doesn’t use it, so…
That comma is a source of unceasing chagrin.
The newspaper at which I work is obsessed with grammar. OBSESSED. omitting the comma in a series like that feels deeply, morally wrong to me.
hmph.
No comma before the last element in a series is AP style.
I get in fights with my editor all the time over this, because she also omits the comma before conjunctions that introduce restrictive clauses (like the word “because” in this sentence).
G.D., be gratelful that your newspaper is obsessed with grammar. Most newspapers these days are obsessed with seeing how many people they can lay off and still function.
As a Journalism major in college I kept having to jump back and forth between the two commas. For my English papers, the serial comma was a yes-yes. But for anything I wrote for J-school, it was a no-no. And the reason? Because the Associated Press style guide calls for no serial commas. And why would the AP be any different than anywhere else? Because they want to reduce as many extra words and punctuation bits as they can since they have such a small character limit per line. And now, many years after graduating, I still find myself second-guessing almost every serial comma I make.
“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”
Excuse me, but I have to go listen to some Vampire Weekend now.
Cinnamon, just use the serial comma and your dilemma is solved. It is the mark of a well-rounded writer! (If house style of your publisher forbids it, let their copyeditor take it out!) Now, if I could only get people to use “that” and “which” correctly!
I do not use the serial comma. I suppose that at some point in my childhood I was taught not to use it, and therefore I don’t - it looks very wrong to me. However, I have also come up with a rationale for not using it, which is that I can’t hear a pause at that point in the sentence if I’m speaking it out loud. That is, if I say “eggs, butter, bread and bacon”, it’s eggs (pause), butter (pause), bread and bacon, not eggs (pause), butter (pause), bread (pause), and bacon. Either way, though, it sounds like a pretty good breakfast.
I refuse to admit the validity of the parents, Ayn Rand and God example, as one could much more gracefully say “I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, who always emphasized the importance of proper grammar; to Ayn Rand, whose books were of the greatest assistance in propping up my desk so my computer didn’t slide off it; and, finally, to God, without whom I would never have become an atheist”. If one has written an entire book, one can certainly devote more than thirteen words to the dedication.
LauraJMixon, I love that example and I’m going to steal it someday. Myself, I’m dogmatically committed to the consistent and scrupulous use of the serial comma, except where I’d rather omit it.
LostSailor:
“Now, if I could only get people to use ‘that’ and ‘which’ correctly!”
Ack, please don’t! Like the superstition against splitting the infinitive, the “rule” against “restrictive which” is Strunky nonsense. Seriously, it has no basis in grammar, in logic, or in the way perfectly competent writers have used English for centuries.
Quote: However, I have also come up with a rationale for not using it, which is that I can’t hear a pause at that point in the sentence if I’m speaking it out loud.Whereas I actually *do* hear a pause there that gives equal weight to each list element. To me, it looks wrong to me without the serial comma (and probably ’sounds’ wrong to me as I read the list in my head, for that matter).To me, “eggs, butter, bread and bacon” is a list of three items: eggs, butter, and ‘bread and bacon’, whatever culinary gestalt the latter might seem to imply. In my head, it’s as if they’re a bulleted list and the commas separate the various bullet points. By not assigning a separate bullet to bread, the last two entries in the list get collapsed into being some kind of composite entity. In other words, the usage that seems right to me requires that if one wishes to express it as a list of *four* separate items, one would need to write it as “eggs, butter, bread, and bacon”.Though admittedly, that’s almost certainly an artifact of the style I was taught to read and write, and no more right (nor any more wrong) on an absolute level than your own preferred method of item enumeration.
I’m with Arkades; I hear a pause before the last item in a series, and I also write the Oxford comma because… I dunno, it just looks better to me I guess. It feels more natural.
Like the superstition against splitting the infinitive, the “rule” against “restrictive which” is Strunky nonsense. Seriously, it has no basis in grammar, in logic, or in the way perfectly competent writers have used English for centuries.
Hear, hear! I for one am a big fan of splitting the infinitive for stylistic reasons, such if you feel the modifier with which you are splitting it really makes it more of a compound verb. I also think we need to bring back “they” as an acceptable third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun, because “she or he” is clumsy and singular they seems less of an uphill battle than getting people to say “ze.” People used it in this manner until relatively recently, if I recall correctly, meaning that they could mean a gender-neutral singular entity until grammarian sorts decided it didn’t, and that using it as such is not just a result of the decline of respect for proper grammar.
Isabel, you’re pretty much right - in fact, “singular they” never really stopped being acceptable and generally used. Celebrated writers from just about every period of English history from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present use it, including E.B. freaking White (whose horrid little book The Elements of Style is largely responsible for popularizing the taboo, among much other nonsense).
That said, using “they” in the singular often feels awkward to me and I tend to avoid it more often than not. But that’s my personal preference, and I’ll defend the grammaticality of the construction to … well, if not the death, certainly to the point of hoarseness.
I also love the Oxford comma. A list in a sentence just doesn’t look (or sound) right to me without it. However, the husband (educated in Nigeria under the British system and who speaks British English) does not use the comma and says that it’s use is incorrect. We’ve actually had fights about it.