Post by Deleted on Jun 18, 2011 4:04:54 GMT -5
Jun 13, 2011 10:17:56 GMT -5 @sabazius said:
I use them for clarity, but only when doing so is necessary. "At the store, I bought pears, shirts, pants and cereal" is fine in my opinion, but "At the store I bought two types of breakfast cereal, pears and shirts" reads as though 'pears' and 'shirts' are cereal brands! Of course there are ways of writing which remove the ambiguity and make the serial comma unnecessary, but given how natural the list is as a mannerism, it seems reasonable enough to use a grammatical flourish for clarity. That is, after all, why we have grammar in the first place.Ah, see, the really beautiful thing about arguments in favour of the Oxford comma is the fact that it's not considered necessary in any Romance languages (in fact, it's thought of as a punctuation mistake) so if you write: 'J'ai achete deux types des cereales de petit-déjeuner, poires et chemises.' everybody will be able to figure out that pears and shirts are not cereals without the aid of a comma, but if you're an American (the use of serial commas in Britain has very few supporters - and, by the way, University of Oxford is not among them) and write: 'I bought two types of breakfast cereal, pears and shirts.' people will go mad trying to understand what you mean, pour milk down their shirts and try to eat them with a spoon for breakfast.
Obviously the example used is a little trite, and one would have to be pretty ill-informed to assume that pears and shirts are kinds of breakfast cereal. However, the example is not the argument. Surely you can see that there might be ambiguity in a case where the first noun describes a set of things and the following nouns might reasonably be considered elements of that set?
English is not a Romance language. Trying to analogise the rules of grammar form one language to another leads to such ridiculous and baseless proclamations as 'one should never split an infinitive'. As it turns out, I am British, thank you very much, and your joke about American stupidity is something of a puzzle. Am I the target? Is this an attempt to deflect the attention of your fellow conversationalists away from your argument?
Your appeal to the authority of Oxford and the general popularity of the serial comma in the United Kingdom have nothing to do with whether its usage is right. Indeed, there's no reason to say that we can be definitively correct on what is essentially a style issue. At most, I'm arguing that there are cases where the use of a serial comma is justified by the additional clarity that usage brings.
