#serial comma

K, I just found this out today and I need to explain this to people because I’ve seen people claim it’s mandatory when it’s really not.

For anyone who is unaware, the Oxford comma (or serial comma) is a comma that you can put between the second to last thing in a list and the word “and”. For example, in the list “cat, dog, wolf, and deer” the pink comma is the Oxford comma, which is optional and not mandatory to add to the list.

This means that both of these are technically correct:

Cat, dog, wolf, and deer

Cat, dog, wolf and deer

The difference in whether you grew up viewing it as mandatory or not is regional. It’s usually considered mandatory in the United States, while outside the US (for example, the UK) it doesn’t really matter if you use it or not.

Personally I use it just because I think it looks better grammatically but that’s just my opinion.

An appellate court ruled in favor of Maine dairy drivers in a labor dispute that hinged on the oft-debated piece of punctuation.

For anyone who’s ever wondered what all the fuss is about over Oxford commas, the circuit judge’s 2017 opinion says it all: “For want of a comma, we have this case.”

The Oxford comma debate, and a $10 million comma

In this class action lawsuit, drivers for Oakhurst Dairy sued the company over its failure to grant them overtime pay.

Workers in Maine are entitled to 1.5 times their normal pay for hours worked over 40 per week, according to state law. However, there are exemptions to this rule. Specifically, the law states, companies don’t have to pay overtime for the following activities:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

Agricultural produce;

Meat and fish product; and

Perishable foods

Note the end of the opening line, where there is no comma before the “or.”

Oakhurst Dairy argued its drivers did not qualify for overtime because they engage in distribution, and the spirit of the law intended to list “packing for shipment” and “distribution” as two separate exempt activities.

However, the drivers argued the letter of the law said no such thing. Without that telltale Oxford comma, the law could be read to exclude only packing — whether it was packing for shipment or packing for distribution. Distribution by itself, in this case, would not be exempt.

Without that comma, as the judge maintained, this distinction was not clear-cut:

If that exemption used a serial comma to mark off the last of the activities that it lists, then the exemption would clearly encompass an activity that the drivers perform. And, in that event, the drivers would plainly fall within the exemption and thus outside the overtime law’s protection. But, as it happens, there is no serial comma to be found in the exemption’s list of activities, thus leading to this dispute over whether the drivers fall within the exemption from the overtime law or not.

As a result, the court found in favor of the drivers, costing the dairy an estimated $10 million.

Semicolon; comma splice; comma (revisited) #amwriting

Here we are, entering the second week of National Novel Writing Month. It’s a good time to review the rules for the punctuation that we use (and abuse) so regularly. This essay first posted on March 14, 2018, so if you’re already up on these rules, thank you for stopping by and happy writing!

First up, the semicolon.

This joining punctuation is not complicated, once you know the one rule about…

M (staring at her like an excited puppy): I donno, I just like smiling at people.

K: Well I don’t!

M: ...

K: I’m sorry, I’m angry.

M: ...

M: Serial comma’s really messin you up, huh?