The Oxford disunion
Punctuation its complex but only if you dont use it
I asked Substack’s AI to generate an image for “Oxford comma”. It offered these four options. Thing is, I just can’t decide which is most suitable or even tasty-looking. So, here they are, all: take your pick.
Punctuation is a written linguistic element that nevertheless crops up in transcripts of spoken speech. I often wonder how editors know where to put the punctuation in, say, a speech rendered in written form. If they are wise, they will actually listen to what is said on a recording and then punctuate it correctly according to the manner in which the speech is given. It can, of course, be that the speech is available in written form, it having been read verbatim by the speaker when first delivered. However, that is no guarantee that the punctuation is correct, but emendation has never been a foreign word to the careful editor. The watchword is authenticity.
Authenticity is not served if a road absent signposts is then signposted by a careless poster of signs, whose directions point to “London” but state “To Winchester”. Those who live in the two locations may be familiar with the road, but a road possesses a permanence that allows familiarity by which authenticity may be celeritously evaluated. The bona fide traveller from parts afar, hence lacking local orientation, will quite simply be confused.
The likelihood that any interested reader of a written text will have been here before is marginal, to say the least. And anyone who has been presented by the oxymoronic “A panda bear eats shoots and leaves” may wonder at the profligate use of firearms by these otherwise cuddly ursine companions of man.
Punctuation in written text is like signposts on the road. There are some who eschew it as old-fashioned fud. As superfluous pontification by pedantic prelates of the printed page. They’re, of course, right. It is old fashioned, although it does develop with the times. But, striking it out completely will merely be grist to the mill for those pedantic prelates of the printed page who do pontificate. A word of warning to those who dismiss punctuation with such gay abandon, however. I’ll lay a dime to a dollar that they’d all, to a man, woman and child, run up the blindest of alleys trying to find their way from one end of Winchester to the other, let alone London, if, of a sudden, someone were to flip the switch on their GPS satellite. “Where, oh, where, are the Rand McNally, the Guide Michelin, the Ordnance Survey, when we need them?” And that’s even supposing they didn’t, at the same time, remove every last street sign, and left the weary traveller to figure out the asphalt road alone, with naught but the surrounding countryside as his triangulation references.
In the Second World War, and others since, authorities dutifully removed direction road signs in order to fox invading forces; upon which, the citizens they aimed to protect promptly got erringly lost themselves. In America, they remove warning signs, too (according to a feature I read in the National Enquirer back in my schooldays), for the joy of watching vehicles plummet off cliff edges and run headlong into oncoming traffic. (They really shouldn’t allow schoolboys access to such literature.) It’s nevertheless worth pondering as you diligently pursue the wee arrow on your car’s satnav, “What, now, if the whole thing just packed up; say, because Putin launched a well-aimed missile at our wee satty-light up there in the heavens …?” Blue-arsed flies is an expression that comes to mind. Meanwhile, it seems that Moscow’s taxis ply not the streets of their city, but its eponymous river.
So let’s leave road junctions and take a look at conjunctions and punctuation for beginners, since, as current trends would have it, beginners is where most of us seem to be. Ahem.
An ancient Dr Seuss book of riddles, which I read at about the same time as I was poking into the National Enquirer, asks of the enquiring: what is big, red and eats rocks? The answer is so simple as to take the wind from you: a big, red rock-eater.
What, you might ask, does this teach readers of the National Enquirer? You’d be surprised.
It teaches them that a string of adjectives are separated by commas until such point as the thing described is attained, at which point the comma is deftly omitted:
The rock-eater is red.
The rock-eater is big and red.
It is a rock-eater.
It is a big rock-eater.
It is a big, red rock-eater.
It is a big, red, pedantic rock-eater.
It is a big, red, pedantic, blue-arsed rock-eater.
If you make your prepositive (that means the adjectives come before what they describe) descriptions in this form, you’ll never be misunderstood. Even if you write nonsense. That’s what Dr Seuss taught readers of the National Enquirer.
Make it postpositive, and it still works:
The rock-eater is big, red, pedantic and blue-arsed.
But what about the comma in “make it postpositive, and it still works”?
The construction elides from the imperative (tells you what to do) into the indicative (tells you what happens). The vocative object in the imperative is you, dear reader. The subject (there’s no object, because “work” in this sense is intransitive: it doesn’t do it to anything in particular, it just does it) in the second portion shifts to “it” (meaning “the posit I just made”). To indicate the shift, there’s an “and”, and the comma indicates a shift in syntax. Just as it did right there. We’re usually bright enough to figure out such constructions without the aid of commas. But some are trickier: Give up on hopes and destinies come hither. Is the exhortation to give up on hopes and destinies and to come hither? Or is it an admonition, that if you give up on hopes, destinies will come hither?
So, what of the eternal “Oxford comma”, a source of disunion in grammar and a source of disunion among people?
It’s argued you can slip it in anywhere where you write a list, like big, red, pedantic, blue-arsed, rock-eater or the rock-eater is big, red, pedantic, and blue-arsed. However, it’s not needed in such cases, because no rock-eater that I know is “pedantic-arsed”: the possibility of seeing the final two characteristics as a contraction (such as in British values and mores, where both the values and the mores are deemed to be British, and not just the values) is, even in a nonsense text, unlikely. The Oxford comma clarifies that only the arse is blue, and not the pedantic, and so is logically unnecessary.
However, take a passage such as this (from a university course-content guide):
Introduction to elementary statistical techniques: Variable concept, central tendency and dispersion measurements, normal distribution, probability calculations, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and inferential statistics, chi-square test for categorical data, Student t-test for paired or independent samples, non-parametric tests, correlations and linear regressions.
Where you put commas and, in a list as long as this (especially where it is introduced with a colon (:), things like semi-colons (;) becomes crucial for understanding, especially for the lay reader. An emendation is called for.
Introduction to elementary statistical techniques: variable concept, central tendency and dispersion measurements; normal distribution; probability calculations; confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and inferential statistics; chi-square tests for categorical data; student t-tests for paired or independent samples; non-parametric tests; correlations; and linear regressions.
The final semi-colon between correlations and and linear is questionable. I don’t have enough expertise to know whether the concepts of correlation and linear regression are so closely associated as to be counted as a single topic; or whether the author was sloppy. The plural form of correlations suggests they’re a separate notion. The absence of an Oxford comma (if you like, an Oxford semi-colon, here) leaves me in doubt.
It's not complex. But it is if you don’t do it.