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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The law in question excluded "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of" agricultural products from the requirement for 1.5x overtime pay.

In a sane world where everyone used the Oxford comma, that sentence would be clear and the last item in the sequence would be "packing (for shipment or distribution)" and the drivers would be entitled to their overtime pay. But the Maine Legislature's drafting manual recommends omitting the Oxford comma so the above sentence is ambiguous. And it's really ambiguous because either meaning could really be what the Legislature intended.

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The way I read it, the intended meaning is as if the comma was right after shipment. A list like that requires a conjunction before the last element. "Or" serves that function. If "or" was merely internal to the final item, it would be grammatically incorrect.

Here is the full context, with the only grammatically correct place to put the comma:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment[,] or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;

(2) Meat and fish products; and

(3) Perishable foods.

edit: fixed formatting

Yeah. Actually, the court noted this as well:

> the drivers’ textual points do not account for what seems to us to be Oakhurst’s strongest textual rejoinder: no conjunction precedes “packing.” Rather, the only conjunction in the exemption — “or” — appears before “distribution.” And so, on the drivers’ reading, the list is strangely stingy when it comes to conjunctions, as it fails to use one to mark off the last listed activity.

To me, that seems really conclusive. I'm a little bit surprised that the court still thought the sentence was ambiguous.

I agree, this is different from the classic Oxford comma ambiguities and I'm surprised more people aren't pointing this out.

That being said, omitting the conjunction is a thing that people actually do (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asyndeton), not just a grammatical error. Were I making legal arguments on this case, I would research whether this kind of asyndeton was a common construction in Maine state law.

I also read it the way you do. But interestingly, there is what appears to be an Oxford _semicolon_ between items (2) and (3). The inclusion of an Oxford delimiter in one list and its exclusion in another list would seem inconsistent. If anything, the second list is the one that does not need the extra punctuation because the items of that second list are also delimited by newlines and the enumeration. Very weird indeed.

That was my reaction as well. If the other meaning was intended, I think the sentence would be better written "...marketing, storing, or packing for shipment or distribution...". In that case, I think the comma after "storing" is necessary to avoid ambiguity because there are two "or" conjunctions, but at least the intended meaning is a correct interpretation. That said, I agree with other commenters that if your meaning relies so fundamentally on such a small grammatical point, you might do better using a different construction altogether.

> In a sane world where everyone used the Oxford comma ...

Serial commas can also create ambiguity when they resemble appositives[1]. There’s no single rule that always only ever eliminates ambiguity for these things besides treating English like math and flooding it with parentheses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Creating_ambiguit...

Hmmm... I vote for writing English in direct AST syntax to avoid these ambiguities.

If only I knew for sure which of the entries on the wikipedia disambiguation page for ‘AST’[1] you were talking about! /s

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AST

I actually tend to use curly braces as 'ambiguity braces', when a term is ambiguous. They've met with some amount of success.

Would you show an example?

  a, b, c, or d

  a, b, {c or d}

  a, b, c or {d}

  a, {b or c}, d

(agree (with (I you)))

Shouldn't it be: (agree I (with you))?

I would write it (agree I you) since it is similar to a conjunction - the "with" is implied.

Beats me, English grammar isn't my strong suit.

Quite true in general but I'd hope that legal documents would tend to avoid appositives since they tend to introduce confusion and legalese isn't known for prizing brevity.

Is there a situation where it resembles an appositive which isn't a matter of verifiable fact? In the example "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God" a court could go check and see if the speaker's mother is in fact Ayn Rand. Whereas in this court case, the ambiguity is an unresolvable one.

Devil's Advocate: In a sane world where nobody uses the Oxford comma, that sentence would be equally as clear.

The other meaning would have needed to be written differently, in an Oxford commaless world:

>"The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing (for shipment or distribution) or distribution of:"

/End Devil's Advocate

Since the law says not to use an Oxford comma, writing the rule should take that into consideration. I'd rule in favor of the workers because distribution is clearly not included in the Oxford commaless list which is what the drafting guidelines say to do.

I actually see no ambiguity in this case because the law should have been written without the Oxford comma in mind at all.

In a sane world there are no special interest group exemptions from overtime pay. What the hell.

Not being a native english speaker, I'm probably wrong, but it seems clear to me that were the sense of this sentence to be "...storing, distribution of (...), or packing for shipment", "distributing" would have been used rather than distribution.

The homeoteleuton would have been ruined by using storage and preservation, hence it must contain meaning.

This was in fact a major point of the drivers' case:

>The drivers note that each of the terms in Exemption F that indisputably names an exempt activity — “canning, processing, preserving,” and so forth on through “packing” — is a gerund. By, contrast, “distribution” is not. And neither is “shipment.” In fact, those are the only non-gerund nouns in the exemption, other than the ones that name various foods.

[0] http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-...

That sounds like a pretty good point. But when I try saying "distributing of" out loud, it sounds wrong, as a native speaker. I think converting that to "distribution of" is just one of those natural quirks that isn't a written rule but is very common anyway.

I believe you could drop the "of" in this case and it would make more sense. The final section could read "packing for shipment or distributing:", which clearly shows the separation of the activities.

And it's really ambiguous because either meaning could really be what the Legislature intended.

Initially, I was going to say that they should evaluate the merits of the law based on the spirit of the law. But you are right, it really could go either way.

> they should evaluate the merits of the law based on the spirit of the law

Some laws say "if there's an ambiguity, then take the interpretation that's most favourable to $PARTY". e.g. some consumer protection laws say ambiguity in prewritten sales contracts must be interpreted in the customers favour. This recognises the power imbalance between joe soap and a megacorp, and tries to address that.

I mean, in a sane world, there simply wouldn't be a need for this discussion, because there wouldn't be exemptions for overtime pay.

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