Serial Comma
Some sentences are ambiguous without a serial comma. Eg. "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God."
Some sentences are ambiguous with a serial comma. Eg. "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."
I imagine there are cases where knowing that the author always uses the same style makes it not ambiguous (or makes it ambiguous?) but I can't be bothered to think of any.
My question is, why do people smugly insist on promulgating cartoons that say I prefer X, Y has a humorous misinterpretation in at least one circumstance, THEREFORE I WIN HAHAHAHAHA! I hate it when people say every side has pros and cons with NO effort to weight them, but I EVEN MORE hate it when people assume that every opinion with a flaw is automatically worthless and all their opinions are uniformly perfect, I just hadn't noticed how often it happens.
Am I missing something? Is there some reason the ambiguities of one style don't count, or are so incredibly rare it's sensible to just ignore them and viciously mock anyone who notices them?
Postscript
For the record, I'm not sure what I personally do, I don't care much. I think I usually do without, but use commas if the list includes "A and B" or "A or B" in the middle, and rephrase or use semicolons or separate sentences if necessary.
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comments so far.
Some sentences are ambiguous with a serial comma. Eg. "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."
I imagine there are cases where knowing that the author always uses the same style makes it not ambiguous (or makes it ambiguous?) but I can't be bothered to think of any.
My question is, why do people smugly insist on promulgating cartoons that say I prefer X, Y has a humorous misinterpretation in at least one circumstance, THEREFORE I WIN HAHAHAHAHA! I hate it when people say every side has pros and cons with NO effort to weight them, but I EVEN MORE hate it when people assume that every opinion with a flaw is automatically worthless and all their opinions are uniformly perfect, I just hadn't noticed how often it happens.
Am I missing something? Is there some reason the ambiguities of one style don't count, or are so incredibly rare it's sensible to just ignore them and viciously mock anyone who notices them?
Postscript
For the record, I'm not sure what I personally do, I don't care much. I think I usually do without, but use commas if the list includes "A and B" or "A or B" in the middle, and rephrase or use semicolons or separate sentences if necessary.
You can also comment at http://jack.dreamwidth.org/861654.html using OpenID.
comments so far.