The Oxford comma, the Queen’s comma, the serial comma. Call it what you may, but it’s practical, vital, and a gift to the English language.
See how it was used there? No, still can’t find it? Well, it’s the last comma in the second sentence. The job of that specific comma – the Oxford comma – is to separate the penultimate entity from the final. More easily, it is used for the purpose of clarification.
Despite its British title, the Oxford Comma is more widely used in America. As standard as usage is on our side of the pond, The New York Times prints daily with the blatant absence of my favorite comma.
Not only is the dearth of the Oxford comma deplorable, but also it can often times be confusing.
In a tweet that I came across, the tweeter made the point of saying that the addition of the Oxford comma rectifies the sentence, “This book is dedicated to my parents, Maureen Johnson and David Bowie,” by making it clear that the inscription is to four people as opposed to only two. The final comma makes it so that the names after the first comma are not descriptive of “my parents.” Admittedly, a love child between young adult novelist Maureen Johnson and rock legend David Bowie would be the best of both worlds.
Now, is it really that hard? One extra curved little tick mark could save you decades of embarrassment from the small community of punctuation-philes like myself.
But toll the bells, for my beloved comma may be just a grammatical anecdote to tell my great-grandchildren as they ask, wide-eyed, what my favorite deceased punctuation mark is.
See how it was used there? No, still can’t find it? Well, it’s the last comma in the second sentence. The job of that specific comma – the Oxford comma – is to separate the penultimate entity from the final. More easily, it is used for the purpose of clarification.
Despite its British title, the Oxford Comma is more widely used in America. As standard as usage is on our side of the pond, The New York Times prints daily with the blatant absence of my favorite comma.
Not only is the dearth of the Oxford comma deplorable, but also it can often times be confusing.
In a tweet that I came across, the tweeter made the point of saying that the addition of the Oxford comma rectifies the sentence, “This book is dedicated to my parents, Maureen Johnson and David Bowie,” by making it clear that the inscription is to four people as opposed to only two. The final comma makes it so that the names after the first comma are not descriptive of “my parents.” Admittedly, a love child between young adult novelist Maureen Johnson and rock legend David Bowie would be the best of both worlds.
Now, is it really that hard? One extra curved little tick mark could save you decades of embarrassment from the small community of punctuation-philes like myself.
But toll the bells, for my beloved comma may be just a grammatical anecdote to tell my great-grandchildren as they ask, wide-eyed, what my favorite deceased punctuation mark is.
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