The Oxford Comma

Let’s not get carried away, now.

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… or we could switch to Japanese.

Perhaps we should ban apostrophes entirely? Seems like a small price to pay for getting the whole its-it’s issue out of the way

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I second this motion. Then I won’t look like an idiot trying to figure out if I’m supposed to say “Chris’s stuff” or “Chris’ stuff”.

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Now look what you have started…

New Hart’s Rules says you can choose to do without the extra s if it would cause difficulty in pronunciation. It’s not necessarily correct, but it’s the book I have and I agree with it :slight_smile:

So definitely Chris’s!

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By default, Inform 7 doesn’t use the Oxford comma. But if you take a look at WI 2.12, there’s a use option to enable it, though Inform uses the less loaded nomenclature “serial comma” instead of “Oxford comma” (American grammarians occasionally also refer to it as the “Harvard comma” for exactly the reason you might think if you imagine why it might be called the “Oxford comma” by some).

So you can put this declaration, for instance, in your Inform 7 source text:

Use American dialect and the serial comma.
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But how will we form plural’s?

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This could rapidly descend into a crisis.

This is an interesting question. I guess it depends…

As a reader, I don’t care either way as long as it’s not confusing.

As a writer, I habitually use Oxford comma.

As a coder, I’d just as soon eliminate the word “and” from the text.

I see: egg, toast, orange juice.

Much easier to code than normal sentence. :wink:

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I am very much in favor of the Oxford comma.

Imagine describing a menu that offered toast, cereal, ham, and eggs, each with a specific price. Now imagine the comma separating ‘ham’ and ‘and eggs’ were removed. Very different.

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I’m British, and all through my school years (several decades ago) we were taught not to use a comma before the last “and” in a list.

Although I don’t remember anyone ever telling me to do so, if “and” is part of the name of an item in the list - such as “whisky and soda” - I usually avoid putting it near the end of that list.

It shouldn’t be overly difficult to do that programmatically.

As far as choosing whether the “Oxford comma” is used by default, I would go with whatever the default was before you added the option.

The Oxford comma helps to avoid confusion.

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That comma usually doesn’t look right to me, so if i have a sentence where that comma makes or breaks the meaning, I’ll write the sentence differently. I haven’t had an ambiguity problem arise with programmatically generated lists as far as i know.

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The phrase “My heroes are my parents, Superman and Wonder Woman” is not confusing to me, as if it referred to just two people it would be written “My heroes are my parents: Superman and Wonder Woman”.

I’m not so sure this actually an example of an Oxford comma-- more like a comma separating an appositive phrase.

Yeah, that example sentence is confusing without the comma or the colon.

I think the actual Oxford comma situation is like:

  • I had toast, eggs and bacon for breakfast.

vs

  • I had toast, eggs, and bacon for breakfast.

…where the comma really doesn’t matter for comprehension but is a style issue. “Eggs and bacon” might refer to a menu item at a diner without the comma, but it doesn’t cause quite the Schroedinger’s parent problem like the superhero sentence does.

Yeah, comprehension-wise I think the only time it really makes a difference is when these two things run into each other – like “My parents, Wonder Woman and Superman, got into a fight.” Here the Oxford comma really changes how we picture this, and a colon clearly won’t work.

This is a fairly rare situation, though, so I think this really does 99.9% of the time come down to a question of stylistic preference. Mine is very strongly in favor of the comma! But it’s mostly aesthetics IMO – the comprehension argument is an edge case but makes the preference seem more objective so perhaps that’s why it often gets trotted out?

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This almost screams for dashes…

  • My parents - Wonder Woman and Superman - got into a fight. (two superheroes fight)
  • My parents, Wonder Woman, and Superman got into a fight. (four people fighting)
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This debate is still going on? Just imagine how many keypresses were involved in coming up with excuses on why everyone refuses to press an extra key.

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If you google “Oxford comma lawsuit” "dispute 2018 $5 million ", then you realize just how important this issue can be!

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