"Why we need the "Oxford comma"." Topic

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I am taking a break from my campaign against apostrophe abuse to call attention to this.

I still use it, although I only came to learn it's called an "Oxford comma" thanks to Weird Al Yankovic last summer.

Burn the heretics and their damn electronic gizmos!

It's not British to use the oxford comma

I use it selectively – just apply a little common sense as to whether there's scope for ambiguity in the sentence.

I was raised with the Oxford comma, and it just makes my earlobes twitch to see a sentence without it.

Except when we don't need it:

"The Queen welcomed a chimpanzee, Paul McCartney, and his wife to Buckingham Palace."

As with any punctuation or grammar "rule," use it when it increases clarity, abandon it when it does not.

The answer, of course, is always to write in simple, short discrete packets of information, so as not to overload your intended audience with irrelevant information at an inappropriate or unsuitable moment, since that would confuse or make your intent substantially less clear, and could mean you fail to convey any useful information as your audience has switched off, put the book down, and gone to find the tablets marked valley forge.

I suggest importing an innovation from Chinese.

Until modern times, Chinese had no punctuation at all. But, recognising a good idea when they saw it, Chinese scholars added punctuation sometime in the C19, including full stops (。） and commas.

Usefully though, Chinese now has two different types of commas: the ‘pause for breath' comma, which looks like ours, and the ‘serial list comma', which looks like this: 、.

I don't know if they imported this useful little tool from another Western language which I'm not familiar with, but it does help with clarity.

"The Queen welcomed a chimpanzee、 Paul McCartney、and his wife to Buckingham Palace.' is clearly a list of 3 separate items.

"The Queen welcomed a chimpanzee, Paul McCartney, and his wife to Buckingham Palace."

And it is necessary to alleviate confusion, as I assumed the reference to Linda McCartney was redundant after saying "a chimpanzee". i get it now, a different chimpanzee.

Yep. Someone was definitely in a semi-comatose state when they wrote that!!!

Dan

The oxford comma is only important if you care to make yourself clear. A lot of writing makes me think that the writer's self-exaltation means we should do the work of figuring out what they mean, instead of them doing the work to be clear. We owe it to them, they're a *writer*, blessing us with their great wisdom. Ugh. Be clear.

The oxford comma performs a function. Those who oppose it value some dubious tradition over functionality. They are fops and dandies!

Not that I want to deprecate fops and dandies, just saying.

Burn the fops and dandies as well!

Clarity can also be achieved by sensible sequencing… 'Paul McCartney, his wife and a chimpanzee'

If Paul McCartney was a chimpanzee, or alternatively, the Queen invited to Buckingham Palace a married chimpanzee and his wife (whether primate or human), both of whom happened to share names with the former Beatle and his spouse, and the sentence was ordered as above, would it not correctly be written as follows?

The Queen welcomed a chimpanzee (Paul McCartney) and his wife to Buckingham Palace.

I can see no reason why the sentence as punctuated in Parzival's post should lead one to ascribe simian characteristics to Sir Paul or his late lamented spouse.