The Oxford Comma

The ‘Oxford comma’ refers to a particular way in which a list of things can be punctuated. This manner of punctuation differs from the way in which I was taught to punctuate during my school years in the 1970s.  I was taught, as a hard and fast rule, that a list of things such as ‘eggs, beans and chips’ should not have a comma before the final ‘and’. As far as the above list goes, this is absolutely fine. However, consider this:

‘I love my parents, Lady Gaga and the Pope’. (That’s one crazy marriage).

Or the dedication to a book which ran as follows:

‘Dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God’. (Not even physically possible).

As mentioned in my preliminary discussion regarding the unnecessarily strict adherence to so-called ‘rules of grammar’, both of these sentences are open to misinterpretation.

How much better to write the following:

‘I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and the Pope’.

‘Dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God’.

Again, the golden rule is: try to transmit exactly what you intend to mean.