Wednesday, September 11, 2013
ALOTT5MA GRAMMAR RODEO AND FUNK-FOLK ENSEMBLE: Slate's David Haglund notes with disappointment that none of pop music's trios—whether Earth, Wind & Fire, Peter, Paul and Mary, Crosby, Stills & Nash, or other notables—seem to employ the Oxford comma. (Nor, of course, does Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.)
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Missing from the survey is Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, whose lax use of commas always made me wonder whether this was a trio with a guy named Joe Frank or a quarter with Joe and Frank.
ReplyDeleteOf course not, as all of those names are well written. If your sentence has an Oxford comma it means it's time to rewrite the sentence to be less obtuse.
ReplyDeleteThe serial comma is used with "and" or "or," but not with an ampersand (&). On a related note, I thought it was a telling sign of the corruption of Mayor Kane in Boss that he told his staff he wanted no Oxford commas in his documents.
ReplyDeleteOr., alternatively, that no one is completely evil and that Kane did have one redeeming factor.
ReplyDeletePeter Bjorn and John don't even use the first comma. For a long time I thought it was just two guys.
ReplyDeleteOne can only imagine how many Almond Joys might have been sold by Peter Paul and Mary...
ReplyDelete