Introducing Rebel with a Clause: WSR Edition

Introducing a new biweekly column by the Upper West Side’s own Roving Grammarian.

By Ellen Jovin

I have had more conversations about the Oxford comma—the comma preceding the conjunction toward the end of a list—than almost anyone in this country. That’s partly because I have taught writing and grammar classes to adults for much of my life, but it’s mostly because I have a pop-up grammar advice stand, called the Grammar Table, that I have taken to all 50 states to answer the grammar questions of total strangers.

The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is intoxicating to the American punctuation imagination. No grammar topic inspires more questions, comments, anecdotes, and complaints than the Oxford comma.

When I am sitting at my Grammar Table in Verdi Square, New Yorkers who won’t consider breaking their stride to chat with me will still yell out things like “Oxford comma or bust!” or “Oxford commas forever!” as they head into the 72nd Street subway station.

Oxford-comma fascination fascinates me because it is about so much more than a wee squiggle on a page. The Oxford comma is a friend that almost everyone knows. Like Joe at the deli or Marie at the gym, there’s that good ol’ Oxford, semi-reliably slouching to the left of the “and” in a list.

“What are your views on the Oxford comma?” you can inquire during an awkward pause at brunch. As a social strategy, that will probably work better than inquiring “What are your thoughts on commas in nonrestrictive one-word appositives?” or “Do you always use a comma before a coordinating conjunction when it combines two independent clauses, or do you sometimes find it superfluous?”

I would rather refer to Oxford commas as serial commas, but if I do, people often look at me blankly. They may think I’m saying “cereal comma,” as in “Karl loved Cocoa Puffs, Trix, and Fruity Pebbles.” To avoid trouble, I just go with the comma-naming flow.

One Oxford comma beef I have is with the lack of conjunctional consistency in its application. People worry about the comma before the “and” but regularly ignore “or,” which is also a coordinating conjunction and also appears in lists. If you’re going to get bent out of shape about the comma before an “and,” why not stick up for the “or” comma, too? For example: “In my household, there were no Cocoa Puffs, Trix, or Fruity Pebbles.”

Poor or.

As for me, I can go either way on Oxford commas. It’s a style choice, but I get the attraction to a reliable rule. People like patterns and routines. If your underwear usually goes in the top drawer, mostly you don’t like it when someone drops it in the second drawer. Oxford commas work like underwear.

A few years ago, a couple of women complained to me that men were putting their Oxford comma preferences (definitely pro) in their online dating profiles. The women were not amused. They swiped left.

Even though Oxford comma users are on average more committed than nonusers, there is passion on both sides. I recently received an email with the adamant postscript “No miserable Oxford comma for me!”

Some Oxford comma absolutists are current or former journalists who follow, or used to follow, Associated Press style, which governs a lot of what we see in newspapers.

Some years ago, I submitted an article to a U.S. newspaper. Before publication, I found that a critical comma in a list had been removed. The trouble-causing sentence was patterned like this one: “At the picnic, I ate spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, and lasagna.”

See that comma after “cheese”? I had a cheeselike comma in my sentence and they took it out. That was not OK with me, so emails promptly began to get written. The Associated Press does not deny people the right to use Oxford commas. That people think it does is typical of the trouble we have with many types of human knowledge. People oversimply, misremember, and fetishize. That’s what has happened with the Oxford comma.

If more AP style followers consulted the actual Associated Press Stylebook rather than their memories of it, they would see that it endorses the serial comma in cases where omitting it would make the meaning unclear, or where one of the elements includes a conjunction, or where the list consists of complex phrases.

It took a few emails, but my cheese comma was eventually returned to me.

The Oxford Comma Wars seem likely to continue unabated. Fortunately, unresolved sentence skirmishes serve an important societal function: They keep us talking, and then afterward, we can still hang out and get along.

As one person recently emailed me, “I’m definitely on Team Oxford Comma, but I like to think that I’m open-minded and nonjudgmental enough to still be friends with those on the wrong side.”

Ellen Jovin is the author of the national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and the subject of a new docu-comedy by Brandt Johnson, also called Rebel with a Clause, which is currently in residence at New Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side and playing at theaters around the country.

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