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To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes (from the guy who developed Comic Sans): If you really love the Oxford Comma you don't know much about writing and need a new hobby. If you really hate the Oxford Comma you don't know much about writing and need a new hobby.
I'm as big a fan of the Oxford comma as anyone, but the court ruling here was ridiculous. External evidence, including the state legislature's style guide, made it perfectly clear what the law meant.
style guides are not laws and if the style guide changes it changes the meaning of the law.
Feels like they could have made this even simpler by reordering the exemptions. For example: The distribution, canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing or packing for shipment of: I'm a fan of the Oxford comma and think it would still add clarity here. The semicolon solution is ham-fisted and unnecessary.
I'm as big a fan of the Oxford comma as anyone, but the court ruling here was ridiculous. External evidence, including the state legislature's style guide, made it perfectly clear what the law meant.
style guides are not laws and if the style guide changes it changes the meaning of the law.
Explicit is better than implicit, even when the end result is more wordy.
There's dozens of ways to rephrase this, but here's one:
The overtime provision of this section does not apply in cases when any of the hereby enumerated activities are done to any of the hereby enumerated categories of items.
The activities are:
(1) canning; (2) processing; (3) preserving; (4) freezing; (5) drying; (6) marketing; (7) storing; (8) packing for shipment; (9) distributing.
The categories of items are:
(1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; (3) Perishable foods.
Furthermore, there's an entire other line in this same paragraph about egg processing facilities above a certain size. This should be broken out elsewhere.
Uhmh, can anyone elaborate on exactly why someone driving perishable food should be exempt from overtime pay ? Isn't it a bit ass-backwards: exactly those who need to work overtime so the food doesn't spoil are the ones who cannot get overtime? Am I reading that correctly?
That clever bastard dropped an Oxford comma right from the very first sentence of the article. (I understand the Times style guide advises against it. I'm still pretty sure he did it on purpose.)
I see no Oxford comma there. Am I missing something?
"A, B, C or D" is a correct sentence without Oxford comma, and the structure used originally. "A, B, C, or D" is also correct, and does have the Oxford comma. But the interpretation I mentioned reads the sentence as "A, B, C" -- where C is the whole of "packing for shipment or distribution". You need something there, either "and" or "or" or something similar. I'd say the language is perfectly unambiguous, if a little strained. But that's just law texts in general.
Edit: consistency
