If you don't understand Oxford Commas, you aren't fluent in English.
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A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
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Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#82Many people use the Oxford comma in every case because they don’t trust their own judgement about ambiguity. That’s always struck me as pretty lazy, despite proponents insisting it’s some sort of principled stance.
A writer should strive for clarity over style whenever possible.
A poet sits in the dappled shade of a tree's summer embrace, face flashing momentarily in disagreement.
Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which government? Two states still had established churches when the First Amendment took effect.
If the framers hadn't felt the First Amendment to be necessary, based on their awareness of both classical and all-too-recent history, they wouldn't have bothered including it. Arguably the same is true for the Second Amendment.
They didn't – Madison and Hamilton were backed into a corner during the ratification process by the anti-Federalists.
Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#84> “The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters with a tomato sauce over rice, broccoli salad and bread pudding with chocolate sauce.” A comma after “broccoli salad” would have cleared the table before dessert. I think if you write a sentence that's highly dependent on the reader paying careful attention to where an easy-to-miss comma is, you assume all readers know what Oxford commas are, and the sentence generates a…
> “The next day, I enjoyed pan-roasted oysters, with a tomato, sauce over rice, and broccoli, salad, followed by bread, pudding, with chocolate sauce.”
yum ;P
Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#85Why, commas not withstanding, should Maine prevent people in the food supply chain business from getting overtime. I am pinko-Euro-liberal and even I think that's government meddling. Is there a historic reason for this if just labour-bashing ?
"During the New Deal Era, President Roosevelt struck a bargain with Southern Democrats: they would support worker rights legislation so long as their farmworkers (and other predominantly African-American workers, such as domestic workers) were exempt. Thus, Congress excluded farmworkers from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), the main federal law that protects workers who join and organize labor unions,…
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Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#86personally, i generally find the absence of an oxford comma slightly jarring even without any ambiguity issue- i feel it matches the way i read and speak (midwest en-us) conversely, i only use semicolons in javascript when required..
Missing caps on the first letter of a sentence feels kinda odd also.
Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's another argument in itself. I was always taught that phrases set apart by semicolons need to be capable of standing alone as complete sentences, so it's jarring to see them used to delimit nouns or noun phrases in a list. At the same time, the language clearly needs a comma-like operator with higher precedence than the comma, and it's very hard to argue against pressing the semicolon into that role.
The semicolon is often used as a superlist separator, with commas used for the sublists.
Yes, that's the point -- it's often used that way, but not "correctly."
Re: A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma (2017)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the framers hadn't felt the First Amendment to be necessary, based on their awareness of both classical and all-too-recent history, they wouldn't have bothered including it. Arguably the same is true for the Second Amendment.
They didn't – Madison and Hamilton were backed into a corner during the ratification process by the anti-Federalists.
(Shrug) What ended up in the document is what counts, the rest is just commentary.