The Oxford Comma

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Sometimes I think that if the band Vampire Weekend hadn't recorded a silly song called "Oxford Comma" in 2008, people would not be discussing this minor issue of punctuation as much as they do today.

This issue ebbs and flows.  Currently it seems to be flowing.  The question is whether a comma should separate the penultimate item in a group of things and the word "and" or "or."

Here is an example from the AP (Associated Press) Stylebook, used by journalists.

      "The U.S." flag is red, white and blue."

Academic writers -- represented by The Oxford University Press and the Modern Language Association's MLA Style Manual -- would render the sentence differently.

"The U.S. flag is red, white, and blue."

In simple strings of words, the distinction makes no difference.  The meaning is clear.

Wags for generations have had fun making up sentences that are rendered ridiculous when the Oxford comma is not employed.  The best one, much repeated, seems to be this:

By plane, train and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey 

made by Mark Twain a century ago.  The highlights 

of his global tour include encounters with 

Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

Mental Floss picked this up last year and claimed its provenance was a newspaper television listing.  I doubt this.  I think someone with a wicked sense of humor spent days coming up with this wording and then planted it on internet discussion boards.  It's too funny to have happened by accident.

When I was a student, I used the Oxford comma.  It made sense to me to treat each item in a series equally, i.e., with its own comma.

When I was a journalist, the Oxford comma was verboten.  If I put one in a story, a copy editor would strike it out.  At that time, I also was reading a lot of other reporters' work.  I got used to the look of a series of words that did not include the seminal comma.  Over time, it came to look right to me.  It still looks right to me.

To explain journalism's banning of the comma, I would make two points.

First is that the practice originated in the hot-type period, when printers painstakingly loaded every character into a tray, by hand, to make up each page of print.  (An example is below.)  Any reduction in the number of characters was a small but valuable efficiency.  Extra commas fell into this category.

Second is that a comma is the occasion for a pause in a sentence.  Journalism thrives on active words and descriptions of events.  Pauses frustrate the purpose.

Two fine American writers -- journalist H.L Mencken and humorist James Thurber -- were opposed to the Oxford comma.  If they were against it, I figure I can be too.


Note:  Here is a video of Vampire Weekend singing the "Oxford Comma" song.  It doesn't seem to be about the Oxford comma, which isn't surprising when you think about it.  There isn't a lot of music out there on the subject of punctuation.  While the song is pleasant enough, I'm not sure that it is about anything at all.