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Listening to Martha's mini-rant in a recent episode made me think. If, in one sitting, she breakfasted on Froot Loops, Corn Pops, Frosted Flakes, Trix, Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms, would all that sugar give her a Cereal Coma?
I actually thought I was being original with this but, as always, a Google search proved me wrong 🙁
Petey, what episode were you referring to? I must have missed that one.
It was my understanding that, except where required to avoid ambiguity (for example, in the dedication "To my children, my English teacher and the President."), the use or non-use of serial commas was NOT universally agreed upon, at least in English. Different Style Guides make different recommendations. I've always used them, based simply on cadence or rhythm. I think the official term is "prosody." One of the functions of a comma is to insert a pause, and when a serial list is spoken, that final pause is invariably included. Again, at least in English.
The editor for one of my clients always deletes that last comma, and that's his prerogative as an editor. I've never argued about it, and he's never specifically told me "Stop doing that!" So I continue to use them and he continues to delete them.
But then, my Style Guides are over 10 years old. Has the consensus changed? That's why I want to hear what Martha said about this.
In some parlance, it's called the Oxford comma, and it's been argued about for a while. While I suppose there is no real consensus, I shall say that, unless you're a journalist, the serial comma might as well be used, at least for the sake of avoiding confusion. I used to like to use food examples with my classes: "For dinner I had asparagus, a baked potato with sour cream and chives and corned beef and cabbage." No serial comma, but the reader knows which items are coupled because of familiarity. Maybe there's no loss of understanding generally, because almost everyone knows that "corned beef and cabbage" is one dish and "a baked potato with sour cream and chives" is another, but all those ands together seem jarring, like the speaker continually forgets all the pieces of his meal until the end ("Oh! And sour cream! And chives! And corned beef! And cabbage! Tasty!"). I know it's an extreme example, but, if one little comma will fix it all, why not use it?
Heimhenge, the last I heard there is no consensus on it. When I'm proofreading someone's writing I lean toward "my children, my teacher and the President" (no last comma). As you and tunawrites point out there are occasions where that allows for ambiguity or awkward writing, and in my own writing I try to recast the sentence, perhaps re-order the items, so I can eliminate the problem without inserting the extra comma. In others' writing I'm more hesitant to do that, obviously.
My current "client", a humor writer out in California, uses the other rule, and as far as I'm concerned he's allowed. I get didactic about run-on sentences, failure to hyphenate properly and the correction of plurals ("the 1990's" is always, always wrong, for example), but on the issue of what we're calling the serial comma, and of punctuation inside and outside quotes—well, of periods and commas (not bangs and interrogatives) inside and outside quotes, I allow him his own school of thought because there are other schools of thought.
...Not about the past tense of "sink" or "stink", though. Anyone who disagrees with me about that is just wrong.
Anyway, my opinion is that leaving out that last comma is the minority practice, by a margin of 2 or 3 to 1, but if one third or even one fifth of careful writers adhere to a practice that's too many to dismiss as part of the crackpot fringe.
No, that's not too many to dismiss as part of the crackpot fringe!
Or, more correctly, English rules are part descriptive and part prescriptive/proscriptive. The Descriptive crowd believes that English rules are correctly trying to describe the behavior of the herd. The Prescriptive/Proscriptive crowd believes that rules describes the bulk of English, with a certain amount of trends, but tries to NOT follow those writers who just don't know any better, the ignorant, unread, ungrammatical, or just typographically challenged. But between both camps lies the swamp of questioning -- is it a trend or a mistake? (There, of course, lies AWWW, ready to swing the cleaver, cleaving correct trend from mistake correction.)
In summary, of course you can weigh in on whether there is a correct answer or not.
As far as the serial comma (and I enjoyed the cereal coma - is that from too much sugar?):
A comma is supposed to represent where a small pause is injected into [spoken] speech. I believe that, in "For dinner I had asparagus, a baked potato with sour cream and chives and corned beef and cabbage," omitting the comma between "chives, and" doesn't reflect speech -- you would actually put a bit of a pause there, maybe even take a breath. (I would have added it after the clause, "For dinner".) Without it, even if those foods are familiar and traditional combinations, you just don't know whether it's the latest fad at TGI Fridays to have a potato with sour cream, and chives, and corned beef, and cabbage, all stacked up on the potato to represent Irish heritage on St Patty's day, served with green beer.
Though I have seen a few examples where the Oxford comma actually made it less understandable, in 99.9% of the cases it either does no harm or clarifies the meaning, and should be universally embraced.
The ONLY community that clings to leaving it out is journalism (AP Style Guide), and for the life of me I can't think of why. I've heard that it saves a tiny bit of ink times (what used to be) millions of papers, but I don't even think that was ever true, as the space would just be filled with something else. Tighter writing? Not really. Old habits die hard?
Personally I don't feel the need to defend it logically; it's just the way I learned it. But if you want an argument, I suppose one might go like this: "For dinner I had steak and potatoes." No comma there. So "For dinner I had salad, steak and potatoes" is just a continuation.
But I repeat, I don't put much stock in that argument. I do it without the redundant comma because it's the way I'm used to it, that's all.
Those who try to appeal to logic for this problem run into a little problem. If the second comma is required when you order "broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots", shouldn't you also need one with the shorter list "meat, and potatoes"?
Surely if the word "and" alone is sufficient to separate the second item from the first in such an order it's strong enough to do the job.
Ron Draney said:
Those who try to appeal to logic for this problem run into a little problem. If the second comma is required when you order "broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots", shouldn't you also need one with the shorter list "meat, and potatoes"?
Surely if the word "and" alone is sufficient to separate the second item from the first in such an order it's strong enough to do the job.
The "Oxford comma" is included for the sake of clarity. There is no doubt that "meat and potatoes" are two separate things when used alone. However, there may be occasions when more ands appear in the series (I'll reiterate my example from above: "asparagus, a baked potato with sour cream and chives and corned beef and cabbage"). If the sentence is to make any sense on first reading, a serial -- "Oxford" -- comma is necessary. (I should point out that Bill 5 is correct to say that the AP Style Guide, as well as the Times and the Economist style guides, do not use the Oxford comma; that discrepancy is, however, seemingly confined to journalism.) If one is writing a long piece in which it is needed even once, then consistency should dictate its constant use. But, I suppose, if it is nowhere necessary in a piece, then punctuate however you may.
Martha Barnette
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