Missing comma sparks outrage

originally posted by Jay Miller:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
But wait, it gets worse. Much worse.

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t.co
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Excuse me. I have to go hide under the covers now.
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Pish. Dictionaries have always reported usage as well as denotation. That entry is prefaced by "in effect:" which is a common disclaimer.

It is also important to read the front material of any dictionary to understand how the editors have arranged the meanings of a word. For example, some provide the meanings in historical order while others provide most-common first.
 
The distinction between usage and denotation becomes invisible after a long enough period of misuse. Numbers of other words have come to mean their opposite, inflammable being a recent one. I would say that, with regard to "literally," we are still at a point where vigorous mockery of misuse could stem the tide. The evidence from another wine board as well as this one is that the use of varietal for variety may be being browbeaten into more of a rarity. But the situation is chancy, as this dictionary's report shows.
 
Last night I heard the BBC call Wuhan the epicenter (or maybe epicentre, I wasn't listening closely) of the virus. Did the bats live underneath the city? I thought bats lived above us, not below.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
Last night I heard the BBC call Wuhan the epicenter (or maybe epicentre, I wasn't listening closely) of the virus. Did the bats live underneath the city? I thought bats lived above us, not below.
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Have you never seen Batman?
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
Last night I heard the BBC call Wuhan the epicenter (or maybe epicentre, I wasn't listening closely) of the virus. Did the bats live underneath the city? I thought bats lived above us, not below.
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Have you never seen Batman?
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I know he kept his cars downstairs in the garage, but I always assumed he lived upstairs in Wayne Mano(u)r.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
Last night I heard the BBC call Wuhan the epicenter (or maybe epicentre, I wasn't listening closely) of the virus. Did the bats live underneath the city? I thought bats lived above us, not below.
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My experience is that bats live in caves. A cave has a roof so it is not typically on the surface -- as an epicenter is -- but it does not have to be far below it.
 
Bruce Wayne lives in the Wayne manor. Batman does live on rooftops so he can keep his eye out for the bat signal and also swoop down on poor, unsuspecting loiterers and round them up.
 
originally posted by robert ames:
i know that this is far from a new topic here.

nonetheless, i must say that i find the elimination of the oxford comma to be completely bewildering. ink is cheep. anything that can be done to improve readability should be practiced and lauded.

example: "the pub offered stout, porter, bitter, india pale ale, wheat beer, black and tan, and lager."

take out the oxford comma and a person may have to read the sentence more than once to get it right.

style should never be more important than readability. we write to communicate, not so that text will have a certain look.
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Well, any sensible editor or writer would simply rewrite the sentence so that it conformed to style without confusion:

"the pub offered stout, porter, bitter, india pale ale, black and tan, wheat beer and lager."

Now, no confusion.
 
While that's true, Eric -- sensible writers and editors seem to be in short supply, because I've read many, many sentences where the ambiguity was present. So I'll continue to maintain that including the comma is the only sensible guideline.
 
originally posted by Lee Short:
While that's true, Eric -- sensible writers and editors seem to be in short supply, because I've read many, many sentences where the ambiguity was present. So I'll continue to maintain that including the comma is the only sensible guideline.
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If you can't trust an editor to juggle a sentence to get rid of serial ambiguity, you certainly can't trust him to oversee an in-house rule in favor of an oxford comma, even if such a rule existed. And, just as a matter of writing, I agree with Eric's point: in cases in which the lack of an oxford comma causes an ambiguity, you can solve by rewriting, or just using the comma in that case.
 
The ambiguity can be subtle and might not come to light until later (perhaps even after publishing). Including the comma as a custom (rule) avoids the problem(s).

. . . . Pete
 
If you can't see it, it isn't there. If it's there a good editor will see it (not to say a good writer). I understand that newspapers operate with only very fast proofreading, and the internet with none at all. Journals and books get considerably more revision. For better or worse, journals and publishing houses I've written for have been pointedly agnostic about the oxford comma. And so am I.
 
so far no one in this thread has come up with a downside to the oxford comma.

i remain baffled by those that have a burden to ditch it.
 
It's not really ambiguity that's the issue - the meaning is almost never actually unclear without the comma. It's just that the second, unintended meaning sometimes forces you to do a distracting double-take, even while it's clear what the intended meaning is. The better argument for the comma is simply that it helps the mind insert the proper split-second pause in the text that would be there if a person were reading the text aloud.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
It's not really ambiguity that's the issue - the meaning is almost never actually unclear without the comma. It's just that the second, unintended meaning sometimes forces you to do a distracting double-take, even while it's clear what the intended meaning is. The better argument for the comma is simply that it helps the mind insert the proper split-second pause in the text that would be there if a person were reading the text aloud.
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While I'm all for the Oxford comma, I'm equally against the control freak comma that seeks to determine when the reader must pause (that gives me pause).
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
It's not really ambiguity that's the issue - the meaning is almost never actually unclear without the comma. It's just that the second, unintended meaning sometimes forces you to do a distracting double-take, even while it's clear what the intended meaning is. The better argument for the comma is simply that it helps the mind insert the proper split-second pause in the text that would be there if a person were reading the text aloud.
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While I'm all for the Oxford comma, I'm equally against the control freak comma that seeks to determine when the reader must pause (that gives me pause).
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I think that style of comma is used by people who write as they speak. (They may also have a greengrocer in their heritage.)
 
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