UKC

Maybe, just sometimes, pedantry can be socially useful

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/16/oxford-comma-helps-drivers-wi...

In reply to Offwidth:

Great story!

In reply to Offwidth:

I refuse to accept that it's pedantic Or am I being too pedantic.

Al

In reply to Offwidth:

A beautiful demonstration of how much care should be taken to write clearly and unambiguously.

In reply to GridNorth:

It cannot be pedantic when people's livelihoods depend on how it is interpreted, i.e. what it really means.

In reply to Offwidth:

I've learned something today; always thought a comma was not appropriate before "and".

In reply to Offwidth:

Where's your question mark?

In reply to Offwidth:

Delightful. I hate legalese, wading through all those never-ending sentences. It's great to find wording that specifically excludes something that it probably meant to include.

In reply to Offwidth:

I used to work for an organisation whose house style rules did not allow the Oxford comma - it is a brave soul who crosses me on punctuation but I did actually have to obey the rules and I did not like it. I think this story explains why. I like the result, but I don't think it's what the draftsman intended.

In reply to BusyLizzie:

If I had to work for an organisation with such a rule, I would spent my entire time concocting rants about house style rules, rants about grammar pedants, and sentences that required Oxford commas.

In reply to freeflyer:

Yes very good

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

A beautiful demonstration of how much care should be taken to write clearly, and unambiguously.

In reply to Offwidth:

I've heard the "Ayn Rand and God" example before, but that was worth reading for the Nelson Mandela sentence - an absolute belter.

In reply to birdie num num:


No, I think that's a completely redundant comma. Ideally, I would have taken a bit longer and found single adverb that did the job of that compound of two adverbs.

In reply to Offwidth:

I am still pondering this one.

The style guide for our Parliamentary Counsel (the folk who draft our legislation), which is a public document:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/4...
(and is an entertaining read in itself) does not mention the Oxford comma, so far as I can see. Modern drafting seems to put lists of things into sub-paragraphs. Climbing gear includes
(a) nuts,
(b) slings and
(c) cams.
So overtime is not payable for
(a) harvesting,
(b) packing or
(c) distributing.
So a modern statute would not suffer from this problem.

In reply to Offwidth:
Fascinating example of the importance of avoiding ambiguity. Reminds me of a famous author (can't remember who) who was asked to come up with a sentence in which an apostrophe was essential. This was his reply. Two women on the beach, one says "Are those things over there our husbands?"

In reply to Rog Wilko:

"The vicar wore nothing to distinguish himself from his parishioners".

"The vicar wore nothing, to distinguish himself from his parishioners".

came up in a school exam I seem to remember!

In reply to wercat:
Or how different could Moby Dick have started:

Call me Ishmael.

Call me, Ishmael.

In reply to Just Another Dave:

or even


Call me,



Ishmael.

In reply to wercat:

Let's eat out Grandma
or Let's eat out, Grandma.

And of course capitalisation is important. Helping your Uncle jack off a horse is different to helping your Uncle Jack off a horse..

In reply to Offwidth:

This is the most amusing bit of grammar pedantry I've seen in ages:-
https://twitter.com/social_brains/status/841810115216908288/photo/1

In reply to Offwidth:

Should have used bullet points.

In reply to wintertree:


that only works if there are also clear logical parenthes expressed in words alone or in words and punctuation indicating inclusion, exclusion and combination. Bullet points alone do not provide that.

In reply to wercat:

Parenthes ?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

You're quite right - it was poor editing! I don't know whether it is my inept typing or something about Windows 10 that makes the cursor jump to somewhere unexpected in the text for no reason that I can discern. I've come to expect that in an operating system that sometimes ignores me because it has decided to change the "focus" object, even when I'm in the process of typing a password.

Actually, "parenthes" sounds quite a good. Perhaps it is a word that ought to exist.

In reply to wercat:
I guess you meant parentheses rather than something like 'parameters'? In which case I suppose you meant that the ambiguity – to put it in terms of symbolic logic – is the confusion between:

Overtime is not payable for (harvesting v packing v distributing)

OR:

Overtime is not available for ((harvesting v packing) v distributing).

[Though the outer brackets aren't really necessary.]

The beauty, though, is that all this can be done perfectly clearly with the correct use of commas rather than the logical clumsiness/overkill of brackets.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. I seem to remember hearing that one of the reasons that the language in legal documents used to be so strange was that it had to make sense even if the punctuation was omitted or was incorrect, lawyers having had centuries of experience in those problems. It was also said that they were paid by the word, which might be a more convincing explananation.

In reply to wercat:

I think your second explanation is closer to the truth But it's an incredible concept, isn't it, to make a piece of writing logically watertight without any punctuation at all.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:
Use short sentences.