You know how whenever you get a group of people together who all care about something with its own specific rules and history they always find a way to make an argument out of something that looks exactly like nothing to an outsider?  Sports is one obvious example (no offense to Jody Reeves!).  Do all NFL records set since 2021 need an asterisk, since the season used to be 16 games and now it’s 17?  What about records from the dead ball era in baseball?  Or before the three point line in basketball?  You can find similar arguments about rules and subrules in just about any field of endeavor where people are passionate, from chess to hot dog condiments to Beach Boys lead singers.

In English, one of those arguments surrounds the use of what is often referred to as the “Oxford comma”.  The comma, which by all appearances looks to be a standard example of the thing, is named for the Oxford University Press, which heavily promoted its usage in the decades on either side of the year 1900 in its industry standard writing style guides.  And what, you well may ask, is an Oxford comma?

The phrase refers to a comma used in a series of words to demarcate the line between the penultimate and the final items in a list.  In other words, it’s the last comma in a sentence like this: “The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue.”  For many years (and certainly when I was a student in high school), it was taught that the final comma was unnecessary as it performed the same function as the conjunction “and.”  This is also thought to partly be connected to the rise in printing costs during the twentieth century.   Leaving out one comma (as in “The primary colors are red, yellow and blue”) is clearly not a huge change.  Over the course of many thousands of printings, however, it adds up.  All those little commas are fractions of a cent in someone’s ledger.  

But here we are entering the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and a majority of the writing that people produce is now digital.  While there is still an associated cost with producing digital documents, a pile of commas doesn’t make the same kind of difference.  As a result, there is something of a push to re-enshrine the Oxford comma, and a rift exists between those dedicated to clarity and precision, and those who prefer a sleeker, more modern approach to commas.  Language people are dorks, obviously.

Myself, I’m an Oxford comma adherent.  In my opinion, it does make a substantive difference, and the reasoning supporters like myself give is the principle of discreteness, or separating things into positions of equal value.  In the example of the primary colors, each one is equally important and of equal value.  Primary colors are not ranked in importance, they are a set of three equal things.  The Oxford comma creates a visual and logical marker of that relationship.

But, you might say (if you’re still reading this, that is…), an “and” works just as well, and it saves on clutter.  You have a point, and that’s certainly the counterpoint.  But let’s take another example.  What about: “There are many great pets—iguanas, cockatiels, ferrets, spider monkeys, cats, and dogs.”  In this case, the Oxford comma is applied to the list in the same way as the first example.  But (and I promise this is a point), let’s say we do the following: “There are many great pets—iguanas, cockatiels, ferrets, spider monkeys, cats and dogs.”  In a case where the Oxford comma is NEVER used by the writer, this is simply a list with the final item following an “and”.  In a situation where the writer ALWAYS uses Oxford commas, the last pair stands out because it appears to change the writer’s usage rules.  But that’s the trick—it’s a purposeful commentary on the closer relationship between cats and dogs than any of the other items in the list.  In other words, it calls attention to the difference in value between those two items and the discrete items in the rest of the list.

While a lot of times, the difference between a list with an Oxford comma and a list without one is minimal, there are cases where it can be a substantive difference.  Legal and formal documents are one arena where the Oxford comma is generally preferred for that reason.  One way of thinking about it is that using the Oxford comma as a default expands the playfield of meaning—it allows for greater nuance in writing situations where categorization is of utmost importance.  Or to put it another way, it adds another precision tool to the toolbox.

Word of the Week: Barbatulous.  It’s, ahem, a short one this week.  The word has only been used once outside of references to how it has only been used once.  The word means “possessed of but a small beard” and is only recorded to have been used in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens.”  Based on the context of the play, in which an overly nice guy is gradually turned into an overly mean guy through the mechanism of poverty, it is clear that barbatulous is not a compliment.  It is often used an example of how while Shakespeare did create much of our modern language, he didn’t have a 100% success rate.  It’s worth noting that in most historical drawings of him, Mr. Shakespeare is notable for his large forehead and small beard.  I’m certainly not thinking about any of this because I recently shaved and now my neck is freezing.