Staying neutral in the comma wars

 

There’s a cartoon about commas going around on the Internet.

The first panel reads: “With the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.” The illustration shows four people: two men, one bearing a resemblance to John F. Kennedy and the other to Stalin, and two women in G-strings and high heels.

The second panel reads: “Without the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin” above an illustration of just two people: men resembling JKF and Stalin, who themselves are wearing G-strings and high heels.

If you’re looking to pick a side in a silly war, you can stop reading now. That’s all the ammo you need to join the legions of people who believe that the Oxford comma is king. But if you want a clear picture of why this just isn’t so, here’s a column I did explaining it.

 

Tags: COPY EDITING, GRAMMAR, oxford comma, PUNCTUATION, serial comma

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2020 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.