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Comment by loopbit | Hacker News Reader

It might be because English is not my first language and that rule doesn't exist in my mother tongue, but I've always written like that (also, I don't use the Oxford comma and I won't, it just looks weird to me).

It occurs to me that the influx of non-native English speakers in social media/collaborative sites has at least something to do with this change.

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That's funny, because it seems to me like the Oxford comma is the logical rule. The American standard is a special case: "use a comma to separate items in the list, except the 'and' substitutes for the comma before the last time".

See I didn't grow up thinking I was using commas to separate list items, I grew up thinking I was contracting a bunch "and"s. That is:

  A red one and a blue one and a green one and a purple one.
  became
  A red one, a blue one, a green one and a purple one.

Notably kids seem to do the first one naturally.

If commas were list separators and not just a short hand why would we end them with "and" at all.

Possible reason: to distinguish the list from an "or" list.

It was more of a rhetorical question from 6-8 year old me. Yeah, though, and certainly there's other reasons, like distinguishing it from a bunch of dependent clauses. That we elide "and"s when speaking a list is of course a point in favor of the comma being a separator not a replacement too.

At the end of the day it's English; we just do what feels good.

My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English.

When used to form a list in spoken English, these short pauses create a kind of rote rhythm: "While you're at the store, buy milk, carrots, rice, flour, and chocolate." In reading written English, the "grocery list" effect can carry over, and I often find it undesirable, particularly for small sets that carry their own rhythm[1].

I don't have any such difficulty with logical style. If anything, it's the reverse: Preserving the original "nesting" makes it clearer how the sentence would and should be read, aloud or mentally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_... (Note that Jefferson's original version with a nominal "Oxford comma" repeats the ampersand as well, which produces a nice alternative effect).

> My objection to the universal application of the Oxford comma (whether it adds clarity or not) is that a comma in written English essentially always take the place of a short pause in spoken English.

But exactly that's how I parse things in lists.

For example: "Life (short pause) Liberty (short pause) and the pursuit of happiness".

The American standard is logical: command and "and" are interchangeable:

"A and B and C"

"A, B, C"

"A, B and C"

The Oxford style is inconsistently, doubling up command and "and" in the last item.

This is silliness. There are two styles because English grammar is a not a precisely logical formal language. Neither side is wrong; English is ambiguous.

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