Yeah. So an extra key press can save you $5 million.
So far the arguments I see for and against are:
For: Clearly relates the intention of the author without confusion.
Against: Pressing keys are hard. It looks ugly. Some high school teacher said it was wrong.
I just find it funny how much effort everyone puts in to trying to make their writing accessible to those with dyslexia, color blindness, actual blindness, etc, but when it comes to making the meaning clear to the reader, all of that goes out the window because some writing snobs came up with a rule hundreds of years ago.
IFers in the digital age are a unique sub-group dancing for hours per day along the gap between tech specs and literature. I wonder if the reason people seem gather into tribes on this issue is that hiding beneath the surface of this debate is a kind of cultural existential anxiety.
As a language becomes increasingly dependent on orthographical devices to preserve it’s comprehensibility, that language draws ever closer to it’s death as a relevant tradition of information exchange. Looseness of convention, while portending ambiguity, is a sign of confidence in the strength of the language itself and perhaps the culture invoking it.
I read some of the Commanists here as assuming that ambiguity is the enemy of language, and that precision is an implicitly superior goal. I disagree with that.
Ambiguity is a product of linguistic richness and part of the substance of linguistic art. Living languages thrive on it.
The fact that there is a choice about that comma is a beautiful and fragile thing. I savor that most of all.
There’s ambiguity in meaning and ambiguity in intent. (I should have used the word intent instead of meaning in my previous post.)
Ambiguity in meaning is the stuff that literature classes debate over, like narrative themes or why the author chose to end a story a certain way, etc. Basically artistic vision left open to interpretation.
Ambiguity in intent is a mistake. I don’t think the person that lost that $5 lawsuit was trying to argue that the workers clearly didn’t understand their artistic vision. They meant for the law to be clear and it wasn’t because it needed a comma to separate two items in a list.
I’ve heard writing described as a form of telepathy because you’re using the words to transfer the image in your head to another person’s mind. If the words you chose - or the manner in which you transcribed them - results in two possible interpretations of a sentence, your telepathy will fail. There’s nothing artistic about confusion due to poor typography.
Also, as an example of how poor the defense against the comma is, this was the lawsuit in question. “packing for shipment” and “distribution” were supposed to be separate items.
This is the before:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
And the changed law:
The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of:
They used a semicolon where they should have had a comma! But they changed every comma to a semicolon just to avoid using the Oxford comma. It’s ridiculous.
I see what you’re saying and I appreciate your perspective.
Far from describing writing as a form of telepathy, I would describe any attempt at communication as a form of gambling, with varying degrees of preparation, investment, risk, and expectation of reward. When a gambler loses their bet, they haven’t failed to gamble, presumably they just didn’t obtain the most desirable outcome.
Conventions hedge the bets, so to speak. But no single method has a monopoly on successfully assuring healthy outcomes.
People who read the absence of a serial comma (or antipathy toward it) as inherently problematic are choosing to value that particular convention over alternatives (such as simply restructuring the sentence). There are a good many reasons to choose alternatives. It does not imply obeisance to snobbery or neglectful practice. And the value of aesthetics, given that we are dealing with an art form here, need not be diminished either.
When it’s problematic within the context of a specific failed communication, that’s a different story. Obviously no one is arguing that an incomprehensible sentence is a good thing (absent the Artistic Vision requiring slitheytoves, and sopfort).
All the clever sentences showing the need for an Oxford comma only demonstrate the need sometimes to use it.
Inform’s options seem to be either never to use it or always to use it – so if a game’s author is sure that no ambiguity could arise then it’s just a question of style.
All I know is now I need to make a game where there are multiple extremely divergent experiences of playing it depending on how the absence of that comma is read.
You see Johnson and Johnson here.
> sue Johnson
Which Johnson do you mean? The first Johnson or the second Johnson?
> first
"But...what did I do?" wails the first Johnson.
> sue the second Johnson
"Yeah, I probably deserved this." replies the second Johnson.
> sue Johnson and Johnson
The lawsuit is dismissed on the grounds that the defective talcum powder was recalled years ago.
The sequel will feature Larry, and his friend Smith, and Wesson. That will potentially involve some much more violent story arcs.
Yeah, I love the Oxford comma, but the fact that it’s only used sometimes is why it is, in the end, useless. The Oxford comma is used to disambiguate sentences, but unfortunately the fact that it’s not universal introduces another ambiguity: If you read a sentence that’s ambiguous because an Oxford comma is missing, you don’t know if the sentence is actually correctly using the Oxford comma, or if it’s ambiguous because it’s not using it. Therefore, the writer should have rephrased the sentence anyway. (I see I’m not the first to make this point, but I wanted to make it anyway.)
Just always use it. There’s no protection against everything, but that’s no excuse to have no protection at all. Like condoms. The Oxford comma is a condom for writing.
The primary disambiguative effect of the Oxford comma pertains to the specific instance of a serial which could reasonably be conflated with an apposition. Thus, I tend to believe that in most cases it is the construction of the sentence which has generated the ambiguity rather than the lack of a comma. The benefits of an Oxford comma are insufficient to deserve the kind of zealous evangelism that for some reason this subject always brings up. In part, I think this is the sort of meaningless pedantry on which everyone likes to pretend to have an impassioned opinion, like whether you should put milk or tea in a cup first. But, like starting a sentence with a conjunction, the use or disuse of the Oxford comma speaks more often to culture, aesthetics, and context than it does to grammatical efficiency. Unless you’re speaking French, which actually has an official agency dedicated to unilaterally imposing a mandated linguistic register, language is an organic function which is constantly evolving in response to usage variables. The grammar you were taught in school is not the divinely ordained truth but simply a reflection of the dominant usage patterns in your region at the time. Thus, I think there can be an ugly side to overenthusiastic grammar policing, which insists that your cultural context is correct and should be projected on everyone. So although I personally use the Oxford comma, I don’t believe there is much merit in arguing endlessly for or against it. We should approach grammar not as a list of inflexible rules but as a fluctuating system of tensions. Outside of artistic license, grammar should be about producing clarity, but clarity depends greatly on who you are.
I fully agree, and I’d say this is even more true of punctuation than other aspects of grammar - books even from the mid-twentieth century sometimes use punctuation quite differently from how most writers would use it today, showing how fast those conventions can change. But this isn’t incompatible with having strong opinions or impassioned arguments. Everyone who uses language has to make their own decisions about which rules to follow and how. It’s natural for people to discuss the conclusions they’ve come to, give their reasons, and investigate disagreements. Precisely because the language belongs to all of us, we can all have our own opinions about it and hold them as strongly as we want. You seem to be saying that having opinions, or discussing them, is pointless, and I think that threatens to take the fun out of language as effectively as any prescriptivism could do.