There’s an old rhyme that clearly illustrates the need for things working together. It reads: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost.
Dire consequences must have occurred when the above battle was being waged. But how about the big difference a simple punctuation mark can make? Can its inclusion or omission create or settle a lawsuit?
I refer to the Oxford comma, a tiny punctuation mark whose name many of us have never heard of. I don’t I recall ever hearing about the Oxford Comma in all my 12 years at Immaculate Conception School in Las Vegas.
Admittedly, that was a long time ago. True, Oxford University had been around a number of years before my classmates and I studied at the local parochial school. So the English college must have existed quite a while. How about its founding date of 872?
The Oxford comma, also known as the Harvard comma and the serial comma, is the punctuation mark between the second-to-the-last and the final item in a written list.
And how did these prestigious schools come to have a punctuation mark named after them? My encyclopedia explains that the comma got its name because “those two organizations famously promoted it at a time when newspapers routinely omitted it to save space.”
As a young reporter with this same newspaper, I learned early in my tenure that Walter Vivian, the editor, routinely deleted all instances of a Oxford (or Harvard) comma. Why? “We try to save space at the Optic,” my boss said. Of course, all of us can imagine the acres of real estate a comma requires.
Its purpose is to clarify writing; we I.C. Schoolers may have used it without having given it a name, or possibly we ignored it altogether. A couple of former I.C. classmates shrugged when I asked them if they could recall studying the Oxford comma.
The consensus seemed to be that if we had covered that unit under the tutelage of Sr. Mary Portate Bien, she never named it.
Take the following sentence: We invited the strippers, Donald Trump, and Vlad Putin. The bolded comma between Trump and Putin is the Oxford comma. People who punctuate the sentence this way say it helps eliminate ambiguity.
If we leave out the Oxford comma, are we implying that the Donald and the Vlad are in fact the strippers, ready to perform? Or did we intend to write that Trump and Putin received an invitation, and so did the strippers?
Regardless, does a comma — one of the tiniest marks of punctuation — really make a difference? Yes, it does; its omission caused a company millions of dollars because of a lawsuit filed due to the misuse of the Oxford comma.
Here’s what happened:
A group of Maine dairy drivers, tasked with performing certain kinds of labor, claimed they deserved overtime pay for various duties. The company that hired them insisted it owed no such overtime pay. At issue was the wording of the following sentence: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of 1) agricultural produce; 2) meat and fish products; and 3) perishable foods.
The question the courts need to settle was whether the “packing for shipment” is its own activity, or whether it applies only to the rest of the clause, i.e., the distribution of agricultural produce, etc. Well, according to the court documents, the drivers distribute perishable food, but they don’t pack it. And the drivers won the case.
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The Rev. Katie Palmer, pastor of the First United Presbyterian Church, alerted me to the topic of the Oxford comma through an article in the New York Times.