Geek's Corner: The Subtle Nuance of the Oxford Comma

Posted on June 25, 2008 in Uncategorized

‘There are people who embrace the Oxford comma, and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this, never get between these people when drink has been taken.’

– Lynne Truss, Author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation*

The Oxford Comma (also known as the Serial or Harvard Comma) is, put simply, the comma after the last item in a list of three or more things. For example:

This is King’s Cross-St Pancras. Change here for the Circle, Victoria, Piccadilly, Metropolitan, and Hammersmith and City lines.

From that sentence it is clear that the lines you can change to are:

Circle

Victoria

Piccadilly

Metropolitan

Hammersmith and City

Remove the Oxford Comma and the sentence reads:

This is King’s Cross-St Pancras. Change here for the Circle, Victoria, Piccadilly, Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City lines.

Now, in this case the lines could be:

Circle

Victoria

Piccadilly

Metropolitan

Hammersmith

City

It’s all madness. How are we to know anything for sure?!

Apparently there are some examples where ambiguity is caused, rather than eliminated by the introduction of the Oxford Comma, but these require far more unusual circumstances, and I like the Oxford Comma so I won’t trouble you with them here (feel free to use Wikipedia for a more scholarly look at the usage of the Oxford Comma).

It may be time for a small confession. I love commas. I endorse the Oxford Comma, but I also just think commas are brilliant. I add them when they’re not necessary. Actually that’s not true, I just add extra words to make them necessary, to create more opportunities for the pauses that pepper my own style of speech.

The primary purpose of the comma, as far as I’m concerned, is to enable the reader to understand where the little pauses in a passage of writing are, so that they might more closely understand the writer’s voice and how it was intended to be read. It is for this reason that the Oxford Comma must be seen to be the correct option. If you read my example from the London Underground again, you’ll see that you take an almost exactly comma-sized pause before you say ‘and Hammersmith and City Line’.

My point is, the Oxford Comma is basically a good thing, but my boss will continue to correct my writing every time the strange little man sees these ‘unnecessary’ commas, and he is in the majority. People with neither the time nor inclination to care about the nuances of the comma (the kind of people who think Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a trivial little book) have probably never considered the value of the extra comma, and somehow they have won!

Now the one counter-argument that I will accept, is that our language is full of stupid idiosyncrasies with no sensible logic attached to them. That hiccough is an acceptable spelling of a word pronounced hiccup, that read and read (present and past tense) are spelled the same, and that no one knows how to use a semi-colon; are all glorious examples of how a language can develop with little or no sense to the twists and turns it has made on the way. I, for one, quite like that, and have grown to live with the general neglect of the Oxford Comma, and appreciate it as yet another example of the ludicrousness of our language.

* Truss, L. (2007) Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. London:  Profile Books.