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Comment by mwc | Hacker News Reader

"Through the window she saw George, a policeman and several onlookers” clearly refers to two people and some onlookers."

No, it doesn't. If anything, I think the use of the Oxford comma would make this more clear (although the most elegant solution is surely just to draft the sentence in a less ambiguous manner).

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Using an em dash would make the sentence clear.

"Through the window she saw George—a policeman—and several onlookers."

Or one could simply specify who George is by inserting "who is" after George.

"Through the window she saw George, who is a policeman, and several onlookers."

If using the Oxford comma does not make the sentence clear then the sentence needs to be rewritten.

I agree completely, but the original sentence used a policeman as a member of the list, not an appositive. As an ardent lover of the Oxford comma, the only solution for this sentence is to move some words around.

"Through the window she saw several onlookers and George, a police officer."

That fixes two problems with the sentence.

The problem being alluded to is that adding an Oxford comma makes it appear as if "a policeman" is a parenthetical phrase describing George.

"Through the window she saw George, a policeman, and several onlookers."

Does she see two men, the policeman and George, as well as several onlookers? Or does she see one man, George the policeman, and several onlookers?

Agreed. As shown in my favorite illustration of an Oxford Comma dilemma ever: http://i.imgur.com/5LdZT.jpg

Except that if you really meant the second case, you'd use a colon, not a comma.

From purely a grammatical standpoint, it does. If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do would be to add a comma after 'policeman' because it is a parenthetical phrase (i.e. a nonessential bit of detail/information). Without the comma, it is to be parsed as a list.

However, this isn't really a commonly known thing, so it's easy to see how the sentence could be interpreted in different ways.

> If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do would be to add a comma after 'policeman' because it is a parenthetical phrase (i.e. a nonessential bit of detail/information).

Perhaps it's grammatically correct, but now it's ambiguous. Since "a policeman" could be a parenthetical phrase or just another item in a list. I'd rather something be obviously wrong then unobviously ambiguous.

(I'm not advocating for or against the Oxford Comma in the general case. But here, the right approach is a rephrasing, as suggested by the GP.)

Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear in my response. I didn't mean to imply that adding a comma to the original sentence in question was the correct way to write that sentence. I was simply trying to state that without the Oxford comma, according to grammar rules, the intent is clear, as the article implies.

I don't get it: what is the other interpretation, beyond "two people and some onlookers"? Clearly George cannot be "a policeman and several onlookers".

And the added comma, as said in the article, transform "a policeman" in an aside.

You're wrong.

And with your clever repartee, no one will be able to contradict you.

Sarcasm aside, your comment is useless. I think that there is still significant ambiguity in the sentence as written as you parent comment does. It is only saved by the fact that after the "and" is "two onlookers", allowing the reader to make logical sense of the sentence, but it still holds ambiguity.

You're wrong.

Read nbroyal's response above as to why. A, b and c is quite grammatically clearly a list.

It may be unclear if you are not a native English speaker, but it is grammatically unambiguous.

Eats, shoots and leaves.

Maybe there is some regional variation in how unambiguous this construct is. I can easily interpret your final sentence, "Eats, shoots and leaves," as saying that "eats" (n) are shoots (as in bamboo shoots) and edible leaves.

If you initially parse everything after the comma as the aside, you then have only the fact that "two onlookers" is not something that George coul be to allow you to understand the sentence.

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