Just to resurrect a dispute, I append this passage in today's NY Times by John McWhorter on linguistic laissez-faire. I am not fond of McWhorter's political contributions, but, here, writing as the linguist he is, he exhibits a laudable realism:
The crowning example, motivating my laissez-faire take on quotation marks, is the Oxford comma, also known by its more quotidian moniker, the serial comma. You know: “Philadelphia, Berkeley, and New York” rather than “Philadelphia, Berkeley and New York.”
Yes, failing to use it can create confusion now and then. Suppose union rules deny you, a delivery driver, overtime pay for “the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” such things as agricultural produce. Are you denied overtime pay for packing things for shipping and distribution, but eligible for overtime pay for just distribution? Only a comma after “shipment” could tell us definitively.
The crowning example, motivating my laissez-faire take on quotation marks, is the Oxford comma, also known by its more quotidian moniker, the serial comma. You know: “Philadelphia, Berkeley, and New York” rather than “Philadelphia, Berkeley and New York.”
Yes, failing to use it can create confusion now and then. Suppose union rules deny you, a delivery driver, overtime pay for “the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” such things as agricultural produce. Are you denied overtime pay for packing things for shipping and distribution, but eligible for overtime pay for just distribution? Only a comma after “shipment” could tell us definitively.
There was a case that hinged on just this, and the drivers won their demand to be paid for distribution alone. But at times, the Oxford comma can confuse matters. The Chicago Manual of Style’s online FAQs addresses the scenario of a phrase that goes something along the lines of “To my mother, Mother Teresa, and the Pope.” Is Mother Teresa, in that instance, your mother? Most of the time, context makes it clear what is meant, which is why the imposition of the Oxford comma varies so randomly. This newspaper’s stylebook doesn’t call for it in most cases. An especially influential guide in favor is Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” but to my recollection that book needlessly steers us away from things like using “chair” as a verb and toward saying things like “It is I.”
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Oxford comma is essentially a matter of what you consider to be ducks in a suitable row. Certainly, one could use it where clarity demands it, for instance, when the word “and” appears more than once in a series — when the dessert choices are “candy, cookies, and cake and ice cream” — but those who seem to insist on using an Oxford comma in the 99 percent of cases in which it isn’t necessary almost ask for transgression. The quest to get everyone to write “Philadelphia, Berkeley, and New York” is as Sisyphean as seeking for everyone to check their cars’ oil level every month.
Are we not rather too easily given to rules allowing us to look down on other people? Being unreachably persnickety about such things is, in some ways, one of the last openly permissible prejudices, a kind of classism that’s frequently given a pass. (BuzzFeed’s 2019 listicle mocking emphatic quotation marks was almost too predictable.)
