{"id":1700,"date":"2014-03-19T07:31:07","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T11:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2014-03-28T07:36:36","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T11:36:36","slug":"comma-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1700","title":{"rendered":"Comma Sense"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"red<\/a>\u201cPerhaps the most hotly contested punctuation mark of all time\u201d\u2014the Oxford comma is back in the news. Well, sort of. See this 3-minute TED-Ed lesson<\/a> animation, and see what you think. Plus a quiz to test your comma-sense and the chance to participate in discussions of this burning controversy, including one entitled \u201cWhy do you think so many people care so much about grammar?\u201d Hadn\u2019t notice that, really, in everyday life. Maybe it\u2019s generational. Like the MDs who want first-year residents to suffer through 40-hour shifts in the emergency department, because, \u201cgoddammit, I did it and survived,\u201d though possibly their patients didn\u2019t. Those of us who absorbed all the rules hammered into our brains in junior high, goddammit, feel the same way about our hard-won expertise: \u201cCan you believe he split an infinitive?\u201d (that\u2019s ok now, BTW). But not, as I read the other day: \u201cHe sent the email to him and I.\u201d Ouch.<\/p>\n

I use the serial comma, myself, because most of the time it avoids confusion<\/a>. But I confess that using commas in all the technically correct places can make you want to brush at the page as if there were crumbs on it. At the moment I\u2019m reading a Cormac McCarthy novel that is heavily \u201cand\u201d-dependent and nary a comma on the dust-clogged horizon. Makes for an interesting tone.<\/p>\n

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