Syntactic heresies OR Clearly there's something wrong with me

[learnedax]

I opened up Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and I do not make it through the acknowledgments before snidely thinking to myself "Oh, the author's one of those grammarians." Which is to say, she has not seen the light and so does not use the serial comma. Apparently that inelegant ambiguity is more tolerated in her native Britain, however, which I should perhaps take as an extenuating circumstance.

Comments

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

The serial comma is an abomination! It was sometimes referred to at the optional comma. I never use it, and tend to frown on writing that does.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The serial comma enhances clarity,* improves consistency, and reduces complexity. Avoiding it leads to clumsy additional rules such as "add the serial comma back in when the last item includes a conjunction" or "use the serial comma when the list items are sufficiently long". The reasoning for its removal was purely technological, and we have certainly passed the age when such dire space-saving techniques were so necessary as to allow mangling decent lists.

(Mostly, of course, I was noting how readily grammarians can identify those of another faction; the lines of this debate have been drawn for some time.)

*Yes, I know there are cases where using the serial comma is still ambiguous. However, those cases are ambiguous without the comma as well.