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.)

6 comments:

  1. Fred App12:35 PM

    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.

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  2. Joseph Finn1:16 PM

    Of 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.

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  3. The 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.

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  4. Joseph Finn5:34 PM

    Or., alternatively, that no one is completely evil and that Kane did have one redeeming factor.

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  5. J. Bowman6:33 PM

    Peter Bjorn and John don't even use the first comma. For a long time I thought it was just two guys.

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  6. Governor Squid3:51 PM

    One can only imagine how many Almond Joys might have been sold by Peter Paul and Mary...

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