I never learned to use the Oxford comma in grammar school. We were taught not to use it. I wasn’t aware that Oxford University revised its style guide to exclude it. It was my dear friends who are Oxford comma loyalists who threw their arms up in protest. They shouted. They appealed. They made memes. They shouted, appealed and made memes (hehe). Was there even a legitimate attack? And they reverently call it the Oxford comma, as if it’s some sort of privileged popped collar. It’s a fucking serial comma. Proceed.
The English language is not particularly known to have rules it sticks to. French may be “the most inefficient language,” as my German physicist friend once told me, but English is notoriously full of exceptions to almost every rule. The serial comma happens to be the exception in cases of clarification. Its absence is the rule.
Arguments posed by The Internet in defense of the serial comma often use examples where yes, its use is appropriate. In the example below, the order of the list and its clarity are aided by the use of a serial comma. If it were “Oswald, JFK and Stalin,” no such comma would be necessary.
In the next example from The Internet, I have no idea what the fuck the problem is. I wouldn’t have blinked twice with the absence of the serial comma. If that image is conjured in your mind, then you also have no problem with the sentence, “I like tea, crumpets.” Dumb.
I admit, when the issue was defiantly brought up to me last year, I considered it. Every time I wrote a sentence with a list, I tried using the serial comma. One email would go out full of them. The next only had them scattered here and there where I thought it was necessary. Two months in, I had no idea what the fuck I was writing.
My choice to abandon it came down to a matter of style. Deliberate use of the serial comma felt restrictive and formulaic. I found myself splitting my lists into separate sentences just so I could avoid using the damn thing. And then I realized why.
THE SERIAL COMMA IS UGLY.
