I was traumatized at an early age due to this very topic. I have long suppressed the memory till this podcast. This trauma has remained unaddressed for, lo, these forty (very) odd years.
My fourth-grade language-arts teacher insisted on the comma before the “and.†On the first day of fifth grade, my new language-arts teacher gave us a placement test on punctuation prior to teaching us any topics. Every sentence on the test had a serial list. I was scored with a zero for the test specifically due to the serial comma in every sentence. As it turns out, my fifth-grade teacher was totally committed to the omission of that particular comma. There was no appealing the grade.
I suppose in reaction to that teacher's cruelty, I have always held to the serial comma with desperate abandon.
I have never before addressed this great suppresed trauma, and now I feel as if perhaps I am not a totally worthless person after all.
Thank you, oh, thank you, callers, Martha, and Grant.
Gee, what a lousy teacher! I hope things at least got better after that first day. My 5th grade teacher yelled and threw chairs to the floor. His name was Mr. Sheriff, and nobody messed with the sheriff. The only thing that saved the 5th grade for me was my sudden awareness of the astonishing beauty of girls. But I was later traumatized when I realized that they weren't aware of me.
We had “The Rock†in high school. He was ex military, with regulation flat top, 0.2% body fat, the stature of a small bull on hind legs, and 100% combat ready. When he posed a question to the class, he would twist the chalk in his fingers as he waited for an answer, and his forearms would swell and shrink by inches with each flex. It took me nearly the whole year to figure out he was one of the kindest, most compassionate teachers around. I was ahead of my classmates in that realization.
There are plenty of great ones around.
Let's put it into schoolyard language: Your teacher can beat up my teacher.
I worked as a writer on a trade publication in the 1980s. The stylebook for the publishing house expressly forbid serial commas as well as parentheses around area codes (a front slash was all that was needed to separate the area code from the rest of the phone number.)
All because the tiny little comma (or two parentheses) uses ink. Multiplied by dozens of usages in one publication, by thousands of copies printed, by dozens of magazines produced by the publishing house, the amount equaled a lot of ink.
So who says punctuation can't save you money?