Serial, comma, killers
If you’re a professional writer, editor, or just a grammar and usage enthusiast, you’re bound to have a strong opinion about the Oxford (or serial) comma. If you’re a normal, happy person, you probably don’t care.
For those who don’t care, the serial comma appears just before the and in a series of more than two items.
Example: The sandwich selections include tuna salad, roast beef, ham, and cheese.
Serial comma fans argue that omitting it changes the meaning. Without the comma, the ham and cheese end up in the same sandwich:
The sandwich selections include tuna salad, roast beef, ham and cheese.
You might be forced to care about the serial comma if you’re governed by a style guide (usually a massive document that spells out the rules for every imaginable writing situation). Large companies often require all employees to adhere to these guidelines, and most employees rigorously ignore them.
Some company style guides state, “We do not use the serial comma!” leaving no doubt that few are lukewarm on this question. If there is an online dating service for punctuation nerds (and there probably is), I’m sure the Oxford comma preference is a deal-breaker.
The argument for leaving it out has always baffled me. Are we saving ink? Column space? No, the objection seems to be that it can imply an appositive relationship between the item it follows and the item before that. Here’s a well known example:
I met with Lincoln, a rhinoceros, and Washington.
No reasonable person would suspect the writer of calling Lincoln a rhinoceros. If the audience is assumed to be unreasonable, perhaps it’s better to rewrite the sentence.
I met with two dead presidents and a zoo animal.
For all the vitriol aroused by this innocent little punctuation mark (and I’ve seen pedants nearly come to blows over it), I’ve often wondered why someone doesn’t broker a peace treaty with the rewrite-the-sentence compromise. If the sentence is so fragile that only a comma stands between sense and nonsense, maybe it’s a bad sentence. The appositive argument addresses something that happens only rarely, but eliminating the comma in all cases results in more harm than good.
Heated disagreements happen when someone insists that we must choose one of these two options instead of using our common sense. If you’re determined not to compromise, be aware that, of the two, always leaving out the serial comma offers the greater potential for misunderstanding. These three examples have been widely used to demonstrate What Happens when you indiscriminately omit all serial commas:
“I’d like to thank my parents, Jesus and Oprah Winfrey.”
“This award is dedicated to my good friends, Young Jeezy and God.”
“We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.”
Take that, serial killers!
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