The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not

Summary

Did you used to watch Fawlty Towers? If so, you will surely remember the episode in which Basil Fawlty, played by the inimitable John Cleese, is anxious not to offend an incoming group of German guests who, he assumes, carry guilt about their nation's past. He instructs his staff, repeatedly and in increasingly frantic tones, "Don't mention the war!" His anxiety getting the best of him, he ends up goose-stepping through the dining room.Friends, though our hearts are with our soldiers and the hostages, we need a distraction. In this blog post we will not mention the war! Instead, we will take ourselves to the other end of the spectrum of human significance to engage with grammar. Specifically, the essential and much-abused comma.When I was a teacher, some students would hand in an entire page of writing with all their thoughts strung together by commas; not a period in sight until possibly the end. The run-on sentence is probably the worst abuse to which the comma is subjected.Wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” Ah, would that it were so simple. We learn the rules of grammar, more or less, feeling ourselves infused with grammatical purity, but real life, real writing, creativity and an adventurous, nay, a mischievous spirit intervene to confound this purity. "I used to be Snow White," said Mae West, "but I drifted."The aphorism "rules are made to be broken" has been attributed to several people, most often to American general Douglas MacArthur, who said, "rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind." Oliver Wendell Holmes was of the same mind, stating wisely that, "the young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions."In the early years of school we were young and trusting, faithfully learning rules. In spelling, for instance, we learned I before E, except after C. I was a good girl (at that point) and took this rule to heart, believ...