In Which the English Teacher Starts with Commas and Ends, Inexplicably and Not At All Gracefully, with Moralizing

Friday, August 29th, 2008

I want to talk to you today about serial commas. In spite of my degree in Being an English Nerd, I’m not usually too much of a grammar Nazi. I spot stuff, but I don’t stress out over it. This one, though, I actually care about. (And caring about this kind of thing is what you do when you have a degree in B.E.N.) The serial comma, known in some circles as the Oxford comma and at Harvard (I’m not lying to you here) as the Harvard comma, is the last comma in a list of things. For example: “The things Kent puts in his Writing section are boring, nerdy, and pretentious.” Did you see it? Right there, after “nerdy”! Don’t let it get away!

Now, I realize that commas are probably the trickiest punctuation marks.* Periods are easy, and semi-colons are usually just periods for showoffs.** An apostrophe is easy enough to put in it’s proper place (dodging shoes). Question marks, exclamations, and even colons are pretty easy. But commas seem to mess everyone up. I’m not trying to cover all of the bases for commas here (although it wouldn’t take as long as you think). I just want to tell you why this one case is important.

In English, the position of each word in a sentence, as well as the position of each word in relation to the ones around it, plays an important part in shaping the meaning and grammar of the sentence. Take these two sentences for example:

A: Sometimes, when I’m feeling really spontaneous, I’ll combine coffee with chocolate milk because I’m crazy like that.

B: Farmer Joe went to market and bought a grain silo and a new combine.

Of course you know the difference between a combine and the verb “to combine,” but take the key word out of either sentence and substitute some nonsense like “wapfskrthdgu,” and you’ll still know what sort of word you’re looking at because of the way the sentence is constructed. This is the way our language works. And it is this function of our language that makes the serial comma not only useful but necessary.

One of the most notorious examples of an egregious omission of a serial comma is in the probably fictitious case of the writer who dedicated his first book “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Either this is a messiah complex that Barack Obama himself wouldn’t dare touch, or it’s just poor communication. “I like hinge, ball and socket and synovial joints.” You what? Remix. “I like hinge, ball and socket, and synovial joints.” Oh, OK, I might not know exactly what you’re talking about, but I know that for whatever weird reason, you’re into three types of joints.

You could make all kinds of arguments that the “and” does the job, that people know what you’re talking about, that for every sentence that could be ambiguous without a serial comma, there are three that would be perfectly clear either way. That’s fine, and I’m not arguing that with you. But I would submit that it’s kind of beside the point.

Imagine a world where the only people that can reasonably be expected to see anything you write or hear anything you say speak your language capably. Imagine a setting where there is rarely any reason to send a message across the world and where, if it gets there at all, you can expect it to take months. Picture a culture in which translators—and I’m talking about people; just forget about anything electronic—are so few and far between that they are almost considered supernaturally prophetic. If that sounds foreign and ancient, you can at least say it’s imaginable, and I think that’s a lot more than people a little while ago could say from the perspective of the times they lived in. We hear all the time about how much smaller the world is than it used to be, and it may be a marketing cliche by now, but it’s the truth. Anything you say or write can find its way around the world in seconds. More than ever, communicating in a way that is as clear and understandable as possible is a matter of consideration, not just education. In a world where many people could be scratching their heads to piece together what I say a word at a time, I don’t have the right to be autocentric enough to be lazy and unclear when I know better.*** This may sound like I’m overstating things, but I really believe that the human tendency to put the burden on the other person (and I’m as bad about this as anyone) is inexcusable. If you could make it easier, and it occurs to you, and you don’t, that is selfish.

Yes, I did just go from commas to soapbox chastisement that fast. The point is, this whole thing comes down to choosing to be as clear as possible any time we communicate. Sure, maybe it takes a little more education and thinking on our parts, and I’m just giving my opinion here, but I feel like the rest of the world deserves not just our clear communication but the acknowledgement by us that we don’t live in a world populated only by copies of ourselves.

* For the purposes of this piece, I’m considering the differences between en/em dashes and hyphens typographical in nature, or maybe usage-related, but not grammatical.

** The exception, if you’re interested, is when you separate items that include commas. Cities are the most common example: “I’ve lived in Orlando, FL; Virginia Beach, VA; and Redmond, WA.”

*** I want to stress here that for some people, grammar is a really tough thing, just like understanding taxes or businessy things is easy for some people and tough for me. I respect and appreciate that, and I don’t want to imply that people that just don’t know any better are being inconsiderate. People that don’t know the best way to communicate but could easily learn and turn down the chance? Yeah, that’s inconsiderate and lazy.

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