�Ӱ�ԭ��

By Noah Bendzsa
 Student Blogger for 2021/2022

Before I begin my final blog post properly, I must announce the, to my mind, indisputable winner of the French Dispatch-sentence contest. After my last post, the American journalist and entrepreneur Jim Daly submitted the following sentence to me:

It’s not a complete sentence, but who am I to argue with its logic. I can only imagine the drinks those dangling particles tried to order before they were thrown out for violating the grammar dress code.

***

The first thing I am invariably asked, when a person learns I am an English major, is my opinion on the Oxford comma. “What do you think of the Oxford comma?” was once put to me on a first date. This comma is the sexiest bit of punctuation for those outside the discipline of English—probably because it is far easier to grasp and have an opinion on than, say, restrictiveness or suspended hyphens. It is a mark of aesthetic, as well as functional, distinction.

I prefer to call the Oxford comma by its more descriptive name, the serial comma. (It is also called the Harvard comma—presumably only by the people who run Harvard University Press.) The serial comma is not, actually, a comma at all, but a convention governing comma use in a series of three or more items in a list. If, for your kaffeeklatsch, you buy “dark-roasted beans, filters, and extra mugs,” you punctuate with the serial comma; if you buy “dark-roasted beans, filters and extra mugs,” you do not.

Some people think non-serial-comma users always omit the comma preceding the “and” introducing the final item in a list. But when necessary to prevent ambiguity, non-serial-comma users, like serial-comma users, must either place a comma before the terminal introductory “and” or rewrite the list in such a way as to make it unambiguous. For instance, the list in “I bought three flavoured coffees: Irish cream, caramel and chocolate and cinnamon” must become either “Irish cream, caramel, and chocolate and cinnamon” or “chocolate and cinnamon, caramel and Irish cream.” Otherwise readers don’t know whether the mixed flavour I bought was caramel and chocolate or chocolate and cinnamon—an important distinction, coffee-drinkers will agree.

The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA both advise using the serial comma. The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press—and consequently most newspapers—do without it. The reason for forgoing an extra comma, except when you need it, is simple: it takes up less space and therefore uses fewer column inches.

Most lay-people (and by that I mean people who aren’t or haven’t been English students) come down hard on one side of the argument. “The people who do/don’t use the serial comma should be thrown out of their institutions and should never hold a writing job again,” the thinking goes. I have surprised many interlocutors, including the date of the first paragraph, by consistently having no opinion on serial-comma use, beyond the radical idea that popular-grammar discourse lavishes far too much time on it. Use the serial comma or don’t. What matters is consistency.

Unfortunately, in discussions of the serial comma, “consistency” is a loaded word. The MLA, Erika Suffern writes, “would decry the inconsistencies of the use-it-when-you-need-it approach”—i.e., not using the serial comma. The problem with this argument, of course, is that punctuation is fundamentally a use-it-as-you-need-it tool. If we wanted utter consistency we would write a comma (as some of my grade-school teachers thought it should be done) after every “and” and “but,” even were these words not being used as co-ordinating conjunctions or, in the case of “and,” to introduce the final item in a list. But punctuation marks aren’t just dressing for the eye and the page (or aren’t merely dressing for the eye and the page). Today, punctuation marks are meant only to appear where they are needed, to subdivide a sentence into its component clauses, like a diagram of choice cuts, and to prevent ambiguity. If punctuation is not consistent in a use-it-as-you-need-it role, it never is.

The serial comma cannot, without fail, resolve all listing ambiguities, either. Sometimes even serial-comma users must revise their lists. For example, “Debbie Reynolds, my mother, and Gene Kelly went for coffee” is potentially ambiguous. (As in internet examples, this one—which I have constructed—is rather outlandish.) Unless the writer is Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds is not her mother. But you could argue the sentence reads, serial comma and all, like Reynold is her mother, because “my mother” can be read in apposition to Reynolds. In order to remove ambiguity from lists of this kind, we must rearrange the listed elements. “Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, and my mother” gets rid of the ambiguity.

The truth of the matter is, though, that most people read around this kind of ambiguity. They can flip to the byline or the front cover and figure out for themselves that the author is not Carrie Fisher, that someone cannot possibly have invited JFK and Stalin to a party in 1989. (Possibly the most popular internet example of appositional-comma ambiguity is “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” which probably ought to be read exactly as it is written: strippers impersonating a twentieth-century sex-idol president and a genocidal tyrant, respectively.)

On the other hand, very few people could tell me what is wrong with the sentence “Olympus, the city, lies atop Olympus, the mountain” (Alexis 91), and that is comma abuse of an entirely different magnitude than that claimed by serial-comma hardliners. Every one of those commas is unnecessary and ungrammatical. And not only was this sentence written by one of our best writers; it passed through the hands of several editors, untouched, or—and this is the worse possibility by far—with these editors actually contaminating Alexis’s prose.

In writing this post, I have wanted to do more than merely turn over the serial-comma in my hands (though that was certainly part of it). I decided to write about the serial comma because this is my last blog post as the English Department’s undergraduate-student blogger, and the comma signals anything but an end. It is a hopeful, suspenseful punctuation mark. On the one hand, this year I have gotten to know the person who will take up this blog in the fall, and I couldn’t think of another �Ӱ�ԭ�� English student more deserving of a moment of appreciative, suspenseful silence. On the other hand, the comma reminds me of all that is left ahead, for me and for my peers. For some, our academic pilgrimage continues in September. Others are soon to be students of that elusive “real world” everyone has been talking about these past four years. A student’s job, like an infinite list, is never finished.

Works Cited

• Alexis, Andre. Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue. Coach House Books, 2015.
• “6.19: Serial Commas.” The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., 2017. The Chicago Manual of Style Online, . Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.
• Suffern, Erika. “Advice from the Editors: Serial Commas and Serial Semicolons.” MLA Style Centre, 15 Jun. 2017, style.mla.org/serial-commas-and-semicolons/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.