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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

"omitting the serial comma is fairly archaic at this point"

Wish that were true! But many news organization style guides condemn the Oxford comma, with sometimes disastrous results:

http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/12/06/for-w...

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Is there any good argument for eschewing the extra comma when it clearly disambiguates the meaning of the sentence?

I can't think of one, but I also find it (slightly) difficult to believe that anyone smart enough to write an article would insist on ambiguity for no good reason...

EDIT: to disambiguate my own comment: with 'when' I meant 'in cases where leaving out the comma causes ambiguity'. Personally I try to prioritize clarity so sometimes I will use an extra comma, and sometimes I won't.

The extra comma sometimes creates ambiguity. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Creating_ambiguit... for example.

It can create ambiguity as well as remove it, depending on which terms can be appositives to other terms. Classic example:

"To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." (ambiguous without the comma)

"To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God." (ambiguous with the comma)

Not a native speaker, but if Ayn Rand is your mother I'd blame the first comma for the ambiguity.

"To my mother Ayn Rand, and God."

The problem isn't that there doesn't exist a sentence that maps onto only the meaning that Ayn Rand is your mother, it's that there exists a sentence which one could reasonably arrive at that maps on to both the meaning where Ayn Rand is your mother and the meaning where she's not.

Appositive clauses like that often require a comma. [0] I'd argue that this one does, even though it makes the sentence more confusing as a whole.

[0] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/596/01/

If your mother is Ayn Rand, you've got bigger problems.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

But that's just grammatically wrong, in English.

Appositive clauses require a comma. Forgetting God, you can just look at the sentence "To my mother, Ayn Rand." We put a comma there because the object of the sentence is "mother," and then we're clarifying who "mother" is. We'd only omit the comma if "Mother Ayn Rand" were a noun phrase all by itself, like "Father John."

Similarly: "This is to my arch-nemesis, Ayn Rand, who always doubted me." The commas are necessary there for the same reason.

(How did Ayn Rand enter this discussion..?)

Just reorder it?

Is this really less ambiguous?

"To God, Ayn Rand, and my mother."

yes

Very much so.

The first example "to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" could be reasonably and correctly interpreted two ways

1) this book is dedicated to two people, my mother (who is Ayn Rand), and God.

2) this book is dedicated to three people, my mother (who is not Ayn Rand), Ayn Rand, and God.

"To God, Ayn Rand, and my mother" Makes it clear the second interpretation is intended. You can't mistake my Ayn Rand for my mother.

I like this solution, though the order might be meaningful. Perhaps the author wants to put his mother first.

if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas

The best rule, of course, is that hard rules are dumb. Read your writing, have others read your writing, discuss ambiguities as they arise(,) and solve them. Keep in mind you may have to entirely re-word your sentence or paragraph to fix ambiguities.

This is why I think style guides that disallow parenthetical comments are ridiculous. If Ayn Rand was really the author's mother, I think it would make far more sense to say:

"To my mother (Ayn Rand), and God."

If it looks a little ridiculous, it's because it makes more sense this way:

"To Ayn Rand (my mother), and God."

In my honest opinion, most style guides are dogmatic to the point of stupidity. The first time I saw a non-scientific style-guide I spent a week ruminating on why people hated clear meaning so much.

I have a similar question about endnotes. Why? If you want to share a single comment, why not use a footnote? Why make the reader flip to the back of your book to read a 4 word sentence?

I agree, for the most part, about style guides. But I wouldn't stick my Mom inside a pair of brackets (even if she were Ayn Rand). How about

  “To my mother, Ayn Rand, and to God.”

EDIT: Well, I guess that might still be misinterpreted. A semicolon makes the meaning clearer (as it so often does):

  “To my mother, Ayn Rand; and to God.”

That works, but I thought about it a bit, and I think we are all approaching the issue of book dedications from the wrong direction anyways. Book dedications are typically by themselves on a single page, so it seems like the best option would be to use whitespace to clarify meaning.

    I dedicate this book to:
    My mother, Ayn Rand
    And to God

This also gets at the heart of the matter, which is that a lot of style guides are taken from publications that are trying to squeeze as much text in to a given space as possible. If you are writing something where space is not at a premium, such as a law, or the dedication in a book, you should probably ignore suggestions that are meant to save space.

I think on some level writers are a bit like programmers, in the sense that writing a really clever Perl one-liner feels great, but if you have to go back and read what you've written later Python is probably a much better option.

Why not use an em dash?

"To my mother—Ayn Rand—and God."

Is this flat out wrong?

House style where I work (legal industry) is to set off appositive phrases with em dashes, and to use commas and semi-colons to indicate lists.

"set off appositive phrases with em dashes"

That is not English. Simple as that.

It is absolutely English—stylistic English—and while you may not appreciate the choice of style, it is just that—a choice—which may be made or not made without need of accusations that the result you don't prefer is "not English".

This is what I would do if I had to, but the real problem here is that we are trying to represent something that sounds fine when spoken aloud. It doesn't work as well in written form because if all the ambiguities pointed out above. So the better writer changes the sentence itself to read more fluently and not force the reader to parse something that is grammatically correct but ultimately clumsy. Maybe it needs to become two sentences to be clear, and that's ok.

> This is why I think style guides that disallow parenthetical comments are ridiculous

I've never seen a style guide that restricted the use of dashes for appositives, especially where commas are ambiguous. Parentheses aren't necessary, just write "To my mother—Ayn Rand—and God."

I hate this example of supposed ambiguity when using the Oxford comma because it is grammatically dubious. It's not a proper parallel construction. The correct sentence is "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and to God." That example needs to be a scrubbed from Wikipedia.

I have yet to see a convincing example of ambiguity in the Oxford comma that doesn't rely on other grammar or style errors or similar shadiness. Given this I think that the anti-oxforders have essentially no case.

It's hardly grammatically dubious. It's the dominant style in spoken English, and pretty common in written English too.

And you can create the ambiguity just as easily without including a preposition.

AFAIK there's no rule saying you need to repeat the preposition before each item in a list; if there were, the sentence with the serial comma but no appositive would need to be "To my mother, to Ayn Rand, and to God."

Typically, you would only repeat the preposition for emphasis/effect or if it varies for at least one element—e.g., for the latter, "I wrote to my mother, to Ayn Rand, and for God."

The parallelism exists in order to deal with the aside, not because it's necessary for every element in the list. But putting aside that debate, here's the thing. You can't fix "to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" by removing the comma. It's still ambiguous, indeed nonsensical. You fix it by adding "to". That is, the serial comma is not what's creating ambiguity, it's the omission of a word.

But the ambiguity in "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God" is fixed by adding a comma. That is, it's the missing comma that's the problem.

This is typical of the examples I've seen.

> with sometimes disastrous results

There are other language like French without the Oxford comma and that does not lead to disastrous misunderstandings.

It is not like the English language, in general, does not have plenty of room for misinterpretation, even in every day speech. However if you look at the level of precision people need the Oxford coma for, you would have the impression you are in a project coin discussion for a small tweak in the java language causing compiler warnings.

We don't have the "Oxford comma", but we do do lists with commas.

And it would be really confusing if we didn't.

There’s also German, where lists are done as

a, b, c and d.

Oxford comma will get marked as mistake in an essay you write in Germany, and you’ll loose points for it.

Same for Dutch. HOWEVER: why not use it? It often just does not make sense not to use it. If a sentence can be interpreted in an ambiguous way, I personally wouldn't really care.

Because if you know no one will ever use it, you also reduce ambiguity.

Then you can solve the remaining issues with using — instead.

The same grammar issue exists in, for example, Dutch. The Oxford comma however, does not exist there.

While technically incorrect, my daily use of English has led me to start using it in Dutch as well. It often clears up sentences which are ambiguous. Interestingly enough most Dutch people find those sentences perfectly normal because they are unaware the Oxford comma exists.

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