If you’re one of those people who deliberately choose unstructured grammatical chaos by not using the Oxford comma, I gotta ask: what exactly do you spend that 0.000003 seconds you saved on?
If you’re one of those people who deliberately choose unstructured grammatical chaos by not using the Oxford comma, I gotta ask: what exactly do you spend that 0.000003 seconds you saved on?
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Highly popular with me. Not sure overall.
I don’t know that this is an unpopular opinion as it’s just correct.
I rarely find myself writing anything that will be read by people who are too stupid to know how a list works so I leave it off. I was educated in writing for journalism. That’s what the style guides say.
Oxford comma guy here…100% agree
100% correct. There is no room for discussion here.
Does it affect you though? 🤔🤔
Whats the difference?
I use my 0.00003 seconds advocating for the Cambridge semi-colon
Is this unpopular?
Apparently everyone else has a fancy name for commas
Linked List is definitely a better way to list things.
Not unpopular from everything I read that uses them.
It’s cleaner and usually not necessary.
No.
You don’t put a comma when you have a list of two things, “John and Stacy came over” not “John, and Stacy came over”. The point of the comma is serving as the “and” when there isn’t an “and” between two words. “Tim, John and Stacy.” The comma is separating Tim and John, the “and” is separating John and Stacy so a comma is redundant. If you had a list all separated by “and”s which you can do, like “Sharon and Tim and John and Stacy”, you wouldn’t say “Sharon, and Tim, and John, and Stacy”. The comma is redundant (and inconsistent with the way lists of two things are formed) so for the sake of brevity and simplicity of rules shouldn’t be added in.
I guess I have the unpopular opinion here.
Is it always needed though?
I took french in high school and when I first found out french explicitly disallows the Oxford comma I legit died a little inside
I always used the Oxford comma until I joined the campus newspaper in college. They were pretty strict about AP style, which does not use the OC. I will say that it is irrational not to use it when the alternative is rewriting a list to eliminate ambiguity, which we did regularly as editors.
Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma
“A doctor, priest, rabbi, and fighter pilot walk into a bar” versus “a doctor, priest, rabbi and fighter pilot walk into a bar.”
With the latter, the rabbi could be a fighter pilot as well. With the former, it’s clear you are talking about four distinct people.
Oxford comma all the way 💯
For a sentence sure
But a bullet point list is way better for listing things
It’s common in contracts not to use it. If there would be an ambiguity because of a comma, better to use a numbered list.
I was sitting in a restaurant minding my own business when in walks a panda bear.
He walks up to where I’m sitting, grabs a piece of broccoli off my plate, swallows it, pulls out a revolver, fires several rounds into the ceiling, and then runs away, tossing a book over his shoulder.
I picked up the book and saw that it was a wildlife encyclopedia. I flipped through it until I came to the entry for panda bears.
“Panda bears. Native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.”
AP style says no
Wrong sub
I’m in the camp that it’s only necessary when it’s needed. For example if I said “There’s three things I like: bananas, movies and dogs.” Are you in any way confused by that sentence without an Oxford comma? Are you debating whether or not I mean bananas and then a thing called “movies and dogs” and somehow I forgot to mention the third thing?
Clearly not so the comma doesn’t need to be there.
However, in a sentence like, “I’d like to tell you about Mr. Smith, an actor and a comedian.” This is ambiguous. Is Mr. Smith an actor and a comedian or am I telling you about three separate people? This would need an Oxford comma if I was talking about three people.
I find that most sentences really don’t need the clarification but on those occasions they do then I use the comma.
I like it because I don’t know how to read contextual clues and assume the last two are a single option with a comma to separate them.
I tend to use the Oxford comma, but having strong feelings about it is ridiculous. I have never in my entire life seen a real situation outside of very precise contexts like law where it avoided confusion. Every construction I’ve seen to “show” why we need it is either artificially bad writing or people being deliberately obtuse. It’s entirely unnecessary.
Some plan their entire life.
Who gives a fuck abt an Oxford comma?