Oxford comma: yea or nay?

Oxford comma: yea or nay?

Yes. It's a simple solution to avoiding ambiguity and I like the aesthetic of a hard division between words.
>inb4 your sentence shouldn't be ambiguous to begin with

Yeah! The less ambiguity the better.

I get angry when people don't use it

a resounding yes

It is the only way. Multiple times-seconding the ambiguity argument.

I irrationally dislike it because I knew a bunch of girls who made big deal about it in high school. They were the obnoxious type who would've been into "good grammar is sexy" tote bags and the like. I guess there's nothing inherently wrong with it, just seems like a stupid thing that people pretend to care about because it makes them seem "intellectual."

Imagine being this contrarian. Disliking something because some nobody somewhere at some time used it for vanity.

I know it's not a "real" reason, just an association I formed. My view is that you should use it if it would clear up ambiguity, but otherwise who cares?

kek

Why is this only an issue in English? In other languages the oxford comma is considered invalid grammar.

I wish it existed in my Spanish

It's not like it's hard to do, if anything it should come naturally when you're writing

Yea.

They can be used or not used deliberately in the same work for comedic effect. If they were not used always, the assumption would have to be that they were always there in meaning, and you couldn't have hilarious things like in OP's picture happen.

Just use a colon and a semicolon like to which you're supposed.

>We invited: the strippers; J.F.K., and; Stalin.

>We invited: the strippers; J.F.K., and; Stalin

are my eyes being raped?

>implying that doesn't grammatically make sense
Plebe

The lack of contextual clues seems extremely rare so I don't see it as that big a deal. English can omit nearly anything so why not commas too.

Looks ugly.

Seriously though this is exactly what you're supposed to do for lists longer than three items, or lists with complex multi-word items. People usually limit lists to three items just to avoid doing this.

You, should use, comma, as often as possible.

You would only use semicolons if an item in the list itself contains a comma

...

Both are wrong.
>We invited, the strippers, J.F.K, and, Stalin.

This, also in your example an "and" is all by itself between semicolons. You have the right idea, but it's no surprise people think it looks strange.

That's falling out of favor, though.

Or, if each thing in the list contain more than one or three words; so it's more like this; blah bleh blo—aha!

Either that or no commas at all.
>We invited the strippers JFK and stalin. (Cause there's no confusion when spoken out-loud or with context.)
To imply that the strippers are JFK and Stalin:
>We invited the strippers: JFK and Stalin. (Colon would be a pause and some sort of gesture IRL)

Nope. Depends on the styleguide, i.e. the type of writing. MLA, Chicago, APA, etc. I Forget which one but my example is perfect under one of them. Don't use semicolons in fiction at all.

But really plurals should end the sentence

I use it when I feel like it

Yae
It is easy to add and does nothing but clarify.
It is similar adding the apostrophe to "it's" in order to differentiate it from its. Yeah, the two have different meanings, but so does "the strippers, Stalin and Trotsky" vs "the strippers, Stalin, and Trotsky"

That semicolon implies that, the strippers, are in fact: JFK and Stalin.

Oh nevermind, I missed the second semicolon. Which is a good indicator that it (even if it's correct) should be avoided.

c://thread

Commas are unaesthetic. You should try to avoid them in your writing as much as possible.

Don't read Henry James

>tfw taught at an early age not to use the oxford comma
>later on in school teachers get frustrated when i dont use it
>they dont mark off points, just suggest i use it
>i dont use it, cause it makes me feel like a kind of literary rebel
>i still dont use it to this day and every once in a while i find someone else that doesnt use it and there's this sort of "we're the last of our kind" bonding moment

kek
Use it where it makes sense, you styleguidefag

Saying the serial comma categorically eliminates ambiguity is incorrect. There are instances in which it creates ambiguity, in fact. E.g. "we invited the stripper, JFK[,] and Stalin."
With the serial comma, it is ambiguous whether JFK is a stripper. Without the serial comma, it is unambiguous.
Thus any argument for the serial comma on the basis that it "eliminates ambiguity" (q.v. et al.) is specious and should not be taken seriously.

or Virginia Woolf

>>With the serial comma, it is ambiguous whether JFK is a stripper.
only if you are taught that a comma is for series and something else. If you are taught only about series, then it is clear that JFK is not the stripper.

So is this mainly an american thing? Cause if it is i'm happy to keep avoiding it.

But commas are for things other than series. Most relevantly, they are used to set off appositives, for which "JFK" could be mistaken in the sentence.
Moreover, even if commas were only used for series, the ambiguity would not exist in the original image, for it is the same question (is this unit another item in a series, or is it an appositive describing what comes before the comma?) that is the source of potential ambiguity.

The serial comma is mostly British. Standard American usage is to omit the serial comma.

>In American English, a majority of style guides mandate use of the serial comma
?

>quote
>no source
A+

to be clear is it stupid to begin with the strippers and clearly the '':'' is useful here.>>We invited the strippers: JFK and Stalin.


Overall, do not follow people who create problems because they cling to poor frameworks

Well it was from wikipedia obviously.

I invited Stalin, my brother, and JFK.

Nice going, Oxford comma, now I don't know if I invited my brother or if Stalin is my brother.

>In American English, a majority of style guides mandate use of the serial comma
>It is used less often in British English
How come it's called the Oxford comma then?

I invited Stalin (my brother) and JFK.

:P

Maybe this is just because I'm used to the Oxford comma, but when there isn't one, I don't read a "pause" like I do with the other items in the list. I read that first example as "the strippers [pause] jfk [pause] and stalin", but the other I read as "the strippers [pause] jfk and stalin"

I actually never thought about this. Thanks man.

That is how language works

if he were ur bro:
>I invited Stalin, my brother; and JFK.
if you were mediating the UN while hanging with ur bro:
>I invited Stalin, JFK, and my brother.

its aesthetically more pleasing, i see no reason not to use it

my own personal style guide says that if the meaning of a sentence is changed by the presence or otherwise of an oxford comma, it would often be better to rewrite the sentence from scratch

imagine how boring you have to be to enjoy jokes about punctuation

same, writing in spanish and adding an oxford comma accidentally is my most common error.

My thoughts.

WHO GIVES A FUCK