Hahaha the Oxford comma is also one my my hills…in the other direction. The “and” only removes ambiguity if the list items themselves are single, discrete items without conjunctions, sub-lists, or other complications. That’s why the only major style guide that recommends against the OC is AP, which is intended for print journalism, where the speed-of-reading increase is worth the loss of clarity…because print journalism is written for a 3rd-7th grade reading level and you just don’t need that clarity.
As soon as you get into complex, technical, or even just grammatically interesting prose, it’s helpful to maintain more rigorous punctuation (esp. comma and semicolon) usage to disambiguate the kinds of series that you’re going to need.
I am technical writer and was doing some writing where the standard was to NOT use the Oxford comma and it drove me insane. It took like 6 months to unlearn using it.
In the case of the Oxford comma it’s more to distinguish between items in a list that are combined by the “and” or items in a list that are separate items. It’s not used to indicate a pause in this scenario.
Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you’re saying.
If you’re going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don’t be a coward and remove the “and”. How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
I respectfully disagree with the first two of your hot takes.
Oxford Commas are the best, least confusing way of defining the end of a list in a sentence. Sure, most of the time you can just figure it out from context, but not always. Very real lawsuits have occurred due to ambiguous lists, and Oxford commas prevent that.
Gaming laptops are fine, but as someone who’s had one as a student, unless you’re constantly travelling or have a specific need for a portable powerhouse, then you’re absolutely better off just buying a cheap laptop and putting your money into a desktop. Your money goes further performance-wise, and you don’t have to lug around a multi-Kg laptop in your bag to take notes/do light work on.
I totally agree about soup though. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a drink, but it’s closer to that than conventional food.
Speaking of commas & “and”, I hate that people refuse to use the word “and” in news headlines, they replace it with commas instead and it’s just a worse reading experience, I really don’t understand why this is a thing.
Because every character used to cost, both in page real estate and ink on page. Today, it still does in page real estate even if the bits that make up the page are basically free.
Makes some kind of sense, I just feel like it hurts readability way too much to be acceptable.
Like “Norway, Sweden makes energy deal with Denmark, Germany” is very hard to parse, reads like Norway is a place in Sweden and Denmark a place in Germany.
Desktops are better in almost every aspect by a longshot. They’re fully upgradable, can adequately cool the components, and deliver like twice as much power to the processors.
Not my experience, at least for a long while. I give away my old laptops as hand-me-downs, and the one I got with a 1070 on it is still in operation, as is the one I got to replace it. The contemporaneous 1080 I was using at the time is in a box gathering dust.
Maybe I had bad luck with brands but none of the gaming laptops I had or used seemed to stay in good shape for more than a few years, while my PCs last over a decade.
The sample size is always going to be very small, even without accounting for things like purchasing habits or type of usage, so beyond the light trolling of this thread it’s hard to tell.
I will say that desktop pre-builts are more likely to need some tweaking than gaming laptops, in my experience. The last one I had needed a new case unless you like your CPUs well done instead of medium rare and the one before that was an Alienware that needed a full motherboard replacement halfway through its lifetime (I know about the Alienware thing, but hey, they did send a guy to my place to swap that out, so there, overpriced, overengineered garbage justified).
When I went back to a self-built desktop I ended up with a temperamental motherboard that doesn’t like my RAM on XMP on some slots but does on others, and there is some weirdness about the fan curve I can’t quite figure out. It’s all a crapshoot.
Gaming laptops are harder to troubleshoot by yourself, but on the plus side they tend to be handled on RMA, since they are a self-contained unit. Depending on whether you think that’s more or less convenient your mileage may vary on their resilience, I suppose.
I definitely don’t hate desktops or anything, but there was the meme of telling people to not buy gaming laptops for a good long while, even from very knowledgable people, even well past the point where gaming laptops on all price ranges had become very competent and versatile. The pet peeve is more with the repetition of the meme than anything else.
As much power as a microwave oven, as it turns out. In the form factor of a microwave oven, in fact. Even though gaming laptops will give you most of the performance for a fraction of the wattage.
Fully upgradeable is nice in theory, but in practice I’ve had just as many upgrade cycles where it turned out one component or another had updated their standards causing a chain reaction of buying an entire new computer. Oh, your CPU socket changed? Well, I guess it’s time to update your motherboard as well. What do you mean, you need a 1000w GPU with a different cable to go with that GPU? Oh, that new RAM standard? Yeah, physically different. So about that new motherboard…
I don’t know what you mean by Gamings laptops are good. Compared to what? Has there been a rumor that they were bad? I might be missing context. I mean they’re obviously not as good as desktops, but they’re good considering the size and mobility
Gaming laptops have historically had a reputation for being bad for a number of reasons:
Poor build quality compared to flagships in comparable price range
Poor battery life
Poor cooling implementation
Poor relative performance due to above points
Large and bulky, offsetting the value of portability
Cut corners in other ways, like poor color depth, having a good graphics card but a CPU bottlenecking the games that would utilize it, lower RAM than it probably should have for gaming, etc.
And then not to mention some people just don’t like the neon green and red “gamer” look many of them have. There’s the distinction here between “gaming” laptops and gaming-capable laptops.
Hell yeah. The 2003 Alienware Area 51M packed a Pentium IV, a 1200p grade 15 inch display (apparently with both widescreen and 4:3 configs as options), had both Nvidia and ATI GPU variants and traded punches on performance with contemporary desktop alternatives, albeit at a much higher price.
It also came in a rather snazzy lime green color as an option, just like the desktop area 51 from that year. It wasn’t even the only alternative in that type of spec that year.
Ever since Pascal, Gaming laptops have been acceptable. Before that mobile GPUs were abominations that performed horribly and got insanely hot. It’s still a bummer that the CPU/GPU are soldered down.
So how do you handle the ambiguity when saying that out loud? Have you considered structuring your sentences properly so they’re clear? I hear it works a treat.
Joking aside, I caught a glimpse of my reputation score when I logged in today and it has absolutely tanked. I was confused for a while, so I checked my post list… and it’s the stupid Oxford comma hot take.
That is hilarious, but also… you absolute, complete dorks. Never change.
Except by not using a superfluous comma to end lists.
I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.
I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.
Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.
I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.
And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.
So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.
To be clear, you can’t omit the comma and make it ambiguous if you simply acknowledge it’s wrong and don’t make it a confusing optional thing. The comma is more ambiguous than the ambiguity it’s trying to solve.
But I don’t think I buy your theory of it being a difference in how you picture it because, again, all of these are sentences you can and often do say out loud. Either you are constantly confused when people talk to you about more than two things or this is not a big deal unless you psyche yourself out by considering whether the omitted comma should be present.
And if there is any room for ambiguity, in speech and in writing it’s easy to resolve by simply changing the order or by adding an extra word, which is just as much effort as the comma with the advantage that it solves the open question of whether the comma should have been there.
So for instance, “I invited the strippers and also JFK and Stalin”. This is unnecessary in this example, but it has the undeniable advantage that it’s just as clear in speech as in writing.
OK, here’s another way to look at it.
Let’s say the strippers are called JFK and Stalin, for some reason.
How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.
You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.
How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.
You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.
I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.
If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.
If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)
As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.
The Oxford comma is bad. The “and” conveys the end of the list just fine.
Gaming laptops are good and have been for decades.
Soup is not food. If you spill your drink over my plate of pasta I call that a ruined plate of pasta.
Hahaha the Oxford comma is also one my my hills…in the other direction. The “and” only removes ambiguity if the list items themselves are single, discrete items without conjunctions, sub-lists, or other complications. That’s why the only major style guide that recommends against the OC is AP, which is intended for print journalism, where the speed-of-reading increase is worth the loss of clarity…because print journalism is written for a 3rd-7th grade reading level and you just don’t need that clarity.
As soon as you get into complex, technical, or even just grammatically interesting prose, it’s helpful to maintain more rigorous punctuation (esp. comma and semicolon) usage to disambiguate the kinds of series that you’re going to need.
IMO. Hahaha
I am technical writer and was doing some writing where the standard was to NOT use the Oxford comma and it drove me insane. It took like 6 months to unlearn using it.
I had a similar experience. It always felt intuitively, almost morally wrong to be forced to write like that.
I’ll stand with you!
100% agree! I think this is a good visual that helps explain why it’s important.
“We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.”: a guest list with three items.
“We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.”: JFK and Stalin are the strippers.
Great example 😆
I like commas. It conveys the need for a pause in the mental narration taking place as I read and write.
Yeah, which is exactly why you don’t need one to finish lists. It makes it sound like you forgot the last thing. “Peaches, pears… eh… and apples”.
In the case of the Oxford comma it’s more to distinguish between items in a list that are combined by the “and” or items in a list that are separate items. It’s not used to indicate a pause in this scenario.
Thank you for defending the Oxford comma. Please take this fake gold award:
Ah, the classic pedantry.
Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you’re saying.
If you’re going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don’t be a coward and remove the “and”. How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
I posted this above as well, but it’s very relevant to your comment.
Amazing example
I respectfully disagree with the first two of your hot takes.
Oxford Commas are the best, least confusing way of defining the end of a list in a sentence. Sure, most of the time you can just figure it out from context, but not always. Very real lawsuits have occurred due to ambiguous lists, and Oxford commas prevent that.
Gaming laptops are fine, but as someone who’s had one as a student, unless you’re constantly travelling or have a specific need for a portable powerhouse, then you’re absolutely better off just buying a cheap laptop and putting your money into a desktop. Your money goes further performance-wise, and you don’t have to lug around a multi-Kg laptop in your bag to take notes/do light work on.
I totally agree about soup though. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a drink, but it’s closer to that than conventional food.
Oxford comma users unite 🤝
Speaking of commas & “and”, I hate that people refuse to use the word “and” in news headlines, they replace it with commas instead and it’s just a worse reading experience, I really don’t understand why this is a thing.
At a guess: holdover in style from newspapers, where you needed the space.
That seems plausible, wish they’d get with the times!
Because every character used to cost, both in page real estate and ink on page. Today, it still does in page real estate even if the bits that make up the page are basically free.
Makes some kind of sense, I just feel like it hurts readability way too much to be acceptable.
Like “Norway, Sweden makes energy deal with Denmark, Germany” is very hard to parse, reads like Norway is a place in Sweden and Denmark a place in Germany.
Desktops are better in almost every aspect by a longshot. They’re fully upgradable, can adequately cool the components, and deliver like twice as much power to the processors.
Gaming laptops are perfectly usable but they don’t tend to last nearly as long as a good desktop.
Not my experience, at least for a long while. I give away my old laptops as hand-me-downs, and the one I got with a 1070 on it is still in operation, as is the one I got to replace it. The contemporaneous 1080 I was using at the time is in a box gathering dust.
Maybe I had bad luck with brands but none of the gaming laptops I had or used seemed to stay in good shape for more than a few years, while my PCs last over a decade.
The sample size is always going to be very small, even without accounting for things like purchasing habits or type of usage, so beyond the light trolling of this thread it’s hard to tell.
I will say that desktop pre-builts are more likely to need some tweaking than gaming laptops, in my experience. The last one I had needed a new case unless you like your CPUs well done instead of medium rare and the one before that was an Alienware that needed a full motherboard replacement halfway through its lifetime (I know about the Alienware thing, but hey, they did send a guy to my place to swap that out, so there, overpriced, overengineered garbage justified).
When I went back to a self-built desktop I ended up with a temperamental motherboard that doesn’t like my RAM on XMP on some slots but does on others, and there is some weirdness about the fan curve I can’t quite figure out. It’s all a crapshoot.
Gaming laptops are harder to troubleshoot by yourself, but on the plus side they tend to be handled on RMA, since they are a self-contained unit. Depending on whether you think that’s more or less convenient your mileage may vary on their resilience, I suppose.
I definitely don’t hate desktops or anything, but there was the meme of telling people to not buy gaming laptops for a good long while, even from very knowledgable people, even well past the point where gaming laptops on all price ranges had become very competent and versatile. The pet peeve is more with the repetition of the meme than anything else.
Oh, they can deliver plenty of power, for sure.
As much power as a microwave oven, as it turns out. In the form factor of a microwave oven, in fact. Even though gaming laptops will give you most of the performance for a fraction of the wattage.
Fully upgradeable is nice in theory, but in practice I’ve had just as many upgrade cycles where it turned out one component or another had updated their standards causing a chain reaction of buying an entire new computer. Oh, your CPU socket changed? Well, I guess it’s time to update your motherboard as well. What do you mean, you need a 1000w GPU with a different cable to go with that GPU? Oh, that new RAM standard? Yeah, physically different. So about that new motherboard…
I will die on the hill with the Oxford comma. Looks untidy without it
I don’t know what you mean by Gamings laptops are good. Compared to what? Has there been a rumor that they were bad? I might be missing context. I mean they’re obviously not as good as desktops, but they’re good considering the size and mobility
Gaming laptops have historically had a reputation for being bad for a number of reasons:
Poor build quality compared to flagships in comparable price range
Poor battery life
Poor cooling implementation
Poor relative performance due to above points
Large and bulky, offsetting the value of portability
Cut corners in other ways, like poor color depth, having a good graphics card but a CPU bottlenecking the games that would utilize it, lower RAM than it probably should have for gaming, etc.
And then not to mention some people just don’t like the neon green and red “gamer” look many of them have. There’s the distinction here between “gaming” laptops and gaming-capable laptops.
All of those caveats have, again, not been a thing for decades.
There are some nerds that parrot things without understanding them still hung up on saying these things, though.
Decades? Did they even have gaming laptops in 2003?
Hell yeah. The 2003 Alienware Area 51M packed a Pentium IV, a 1200p grade 15 inch display (apparently with both widescreen and 4:3 configs as options), had both Nvidia and ATI GPU variants and traded punches on performance with contemporary desktop alternatives, albeit at a much higher price.
It also came in a rather snazzy lime green color as an option, just like the desktop area 51 from that year. It wasn’t even the only alternative in that type of spec that year.
Ever since Pascal, Gaming laptops have been acceptable. Before that mobile GPUs were abominations that performed horribly and got insanely hot. It’s still a bummer that the CPU/GPU are soldered down.
I’d like to thank my mum and dad, god and satan
So how do you handle the ambiguity when saying that out loud? Have you considered structuring your sentences properly so they’re clear? I hear it works a treat.
Joking aside, I caught a glimpse of my reputation score when I logged in today and it has absolutely tanked. I was confused for a while, so I checked my post list… and it’s the stupid Oxford comma hot take.
That is hilarious, but also… you absolute, complete dorks. Never change.
Except by not using a superfluous comma to end lists.
I think the problem is that not everyone translates text in their brain the same way.
I translate it as if I were speaking it. So when I see “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin,” I read it exactly as I’d say it, which is, the strippers were JFK and Stalin. When I read “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin”, the comma pause is not rendered as text in my brain, but like a quarter-rest in a musical score, and that pause is what allows my brain to separate JFK and Stalin from each other.
Other people translate text more visually, I guess, and that problem doesn’t exist there? I wouldn’t know, I can’t even begin to fathom how “JFK and Stalin” could be read in any way that doesn’t mean they’re the strippers.
I mean, if you were trying on purpose to say JFK and Stalin were the names of the strippers, and not the dead historical figures, how would you punctuate that sentence? Without the Oxford comma, the clause is clearly an appositive, not a list.
And then when you get into longer lists, it becomes even more of a pain in the ass. “Some suggested treatments for this condition are patella surgery, physical therapy and exercise, plate insertion, bone fusing and bedrest, among others.” Is “bone fusing and bedrest” one item? We have another item in the list that’s a combination treatment with “and”, is this also one? Or are they two separate treatments? Did the author omit the Oxford comma, or did they omit the Oxford “and”? It’s very common for academic authors, particularly, to make that kind of typo. They drop articles and conjunctions all the time. Now I have to e-mail the author and ask “What did you mean here?” because, as the editor, I can’t just assume “oh, they don’t like the Oxford comma, so this sentence is fine”. There are a lot of places where a small typo like missing “and” will make or break the intended meaning and the scientific veracity of an academic paper.
So yeah, I guess if all your writing is stylistic fiction where precision isn’t important, and your reading style is visual rather than auditory, an Oxford comma might “look ugly” and it could be safely ignored. But for anything technical, it’s kind of important.
To be clear, you can’t omit the comma and make it ambiguous if you simply acknowledge it’s wrong and don’t make it a confusing optional thing. The comma is more ambiguous than the ambiguity it’s trying to solve.
But I don’t think I buy your theory of it being a difference in how you picture it because, again, all of these are sentences you can and often do say out loud. Either you are constantly confused when people talk to you about more than two things or this is not a big deal unless you psyche yourself out by considering whether the omitted comma should be present.
And if there is any room for ambiguity, in speech and in writing it’s easy to resolve by simply changing the order or by adding an extra word, which is just as much effort as the comma with the advantage that it solves the open question of whether the comma should have been there.
So for instance, “I invited the strippers and also JFK and Stalin”. This is unnecessary in this example, but it has the undeniable advantage that it’s just as clear in speech as in writing.
OK, here’s another way to look at it.
Let’s say the strippers are called JFK and Stalin, for some reason.
How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.
You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.
I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.
If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.
If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say “JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.”)
As for the bit about speech, you’ve lost me. I’ve never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I’ve lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the “and”. Maybe it’s different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.