On 20 April 2010 18:17, Andrew Sullivan <a...@shinkuro.com> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 06:06:57PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote: >> These are contrived examples. > > I'm pretty sure that all the examples in Fowler are not contrived > examples: they're real ones from real texts. And it's not as though > Fowler wasn't pretty keen on clarity and elegance in prose. >
If not contrived, then cherry-picked. Comma usage is no different than any other tool in writing: sometimes the author is presented with a corner case and must either risk ambiguity or revise his phrasing. >> In every case the writer could reword >> the sentence to remove the ambiguity, as I demonstrated in an earlier >> post. > > Sure, you can always rewrite a sentence in a way less idiomatic in > order to avoid the problem. Alternatively, you could do the sensible > thing and use a comma to avoid ambiguity in an otherwise perfectly > normal English idiom. Which of the two choices is the sensible one depends on the situation. I agree that proper usage of the commas could often be the sensible choice. > Enumerations are ubiquitous, and it's not > unusual for items to be enumerated already to have embedded > conjunctions. > I do not find it unusual. Rather, I find that many authors (or writers, or journalists, or bloggers) do not take the time to proofread for ambiguity. It borders on the irresponsible. >> The problem is not the commas, the problem is the desire to find >> ambiguity and then to place blame. > > I don't see who it is that's supposed to be placing blame here. > Those who insist that there is a problem with the rules of grammar. The literature should not present the situation as a problem, rather, unambiguity and methods to deal with ambiguity should be taught. >> A similar example for capitalization: > > No, these are not similar to the obviously common case of having > conjunctions in the names of firms, in the way we refer to couples, > and so on. Correct. They are similar in the sense that they are examples of ambiguity which could be eliminated by a simple rephrasing of the content. -- Dotan Cohen http://bido.com http://what-is-what.com