On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote: > On 05/04/18 09:57, Peter Humphrey wrote: > > Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence on > > a comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it > > gets in the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma. > > > > But that's a whole new can of worms. > > I think we should table that ...
Do you mean shelve it? In this country, tabling something means putting it on the table - for discussion. > I was taught that a comma separates items in a list, an "and" joins > them, and you do not mix the two! Indeed, when I did my English GCE > (that dates it!) I believe the Examining Board Style Guide explicitly > enforced that rule, and you lost marks for breaking it. Clearly a different GCE exam board from mine. My view is that a comma stands in place of "and". Think of a child's earliest speaking days, in which it utters long, rambling sentences with "and" joining the parts. Later it learns about commas and uses those instead. So putting the two together as a matter of course is just repetitious and awkward. > Personally, I do what feels right and I suspect the longer the list, the > more likely I am to use a comma before the last and. To me, the pair are needed only when a particular emphasis is wanted. > But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's > English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is > considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the > Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century. Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's English with Received Pronunciation? > I'm all for standards, but the complaint should not be "it's wrong", but > "it breaks the standard", and importantly you need to know *which* standard! I prefer "it's not idiomatic." Standards go with (in)correctness, which is a mathematical concept (only one answer is correct; all others are wrong); aptness or conventionality are both better. -- Regards, Peter.
