U.K. Health Ministry wants no Oxford commas. Period | Hacker News Reader

U.K. Health Ministry wants no Oxford commas. Period

nytimes.com

16 pointsCaiero46 comments

They're wrong. A good sign of this, is the distain this deeply politicised snarky rule is being treated with, by the British public and the NHS staff who can see it for what it is: performatively useless.

If they'd said they wanted more plain English it might have had some support.

The amount of ink and paper consumed defending it, will exceed the savings. Next, they'll be arguing the colon and apostrophe shouldn't be used.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/16/therese-cof...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/15/coffey-urge...

Brexit demands systematic departure from common sense.

Brexit is a symptom of a systematic departure from common sense

The Oxford comma has been proven necessary in a court of law. Omitting it cost one company millions of dollars: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...

It's a bit embarrassing that the NY Times didn't refer to its own article on the subject.

The article certainly does refer to that very story.

OK. I didn't see that. I wonder if they updated it.

This is wrong and ridiculous because it can change the meaning of the sentence.

The National Health Service has no use for colons? I think they're in the wrong business then.

Imagine being in charge of a department that is literally about life & death matters and deciding oxford commas is the hill you want to die on.

And nobody in the U.K. would say ‘period’ when they mean ‘full stop’.

This is just some divisive noise to distract from whatever policy it is they're trying to hide today. 6.8 million people are on an NHS waiting list at the moment, but the government doesn't seem too concerned about trying to fix that.

How do the people against the Oxford comma punctuate this sentence: "We visited Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Turks and Caicos". Semicolons?

The same way we punctuate “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”.

More seriously, if following a grammatical rule causes confusion you can choose to ignore the rule (or, as would be the sane choice in the Buffalo situation, evade the rule by rewriting to avoid the issue).

Except the Oxford comma PREVENTS confusion, and thus should be the rule.

No, this does not logically follow.

General rule: don’t use the comma. If the sentence is ambiguous to the reader in a specific case, then either: add a comma, or rewrite your sentence to be less confusing.

The comma also dictates cadence. The comma implies a pause, which is also the correct delivery. The lack of a pause is not.

I definitely use both deliveries in speech depending on the context, usually adding in the final pause when it helps disambiguate.

For example, “Apples, oranges and pears” the “and” has the about the same count as the pause after “Apples”; pausing before the “and” feels like a stutter.

You, could, use, the, Shatner, comma, instead

Then you are also arguing in favor of the Oxford comma.

"We're having hot dogs, hamburgers, and peanut butter and jelly.

Or, always use the comma. So there is no possibility of confusion.

Especially in a medical setting where the aesthetics of a sentence are not close to as important as clarity.

You mean "No, this does not follow logically"

I think most programmers can agree that the fewer special cases there are, confusion and overhead is also reduced. Always using the comma reduces a whole area of decision making where one needs to decide if it’s needed or not in every special case.

They rely on the fact that "Antigua and Barbuda" is the name of a single territory, as is "Turks and Caicos".

Humans are quite decent at parsing ambiguous text, you'll find.

Agreed, and besides the broader point, considering this is a writing style guide, is to avoid ambiguous/awkward statements altogether.

If this sentence was describing places you shouldn’t visit as an example, a bullet point list would probably be more appropriate. So in a more context-appropriate example this would probably be rephrased as

This disease is found in the following areas:

* Jamaica

* Antigua and Barbuda

* Turks and Caicos

Now I’m not arguing if this particular style guide is a good idea or not - but I can see why you might want to avoid the original statement which was quite hard to parse with confidence.

Having never heard of "Turks and Caicos" the sentence was quite difficult to parse in my opinion. I happen to have heard "Antigua and Barbuda" as a single place name at some point but even then I wasn't entirely sure until I saw your explainer.

All confusion could be removed by a few commas, I don't see why you wouldn't add those.

The sentence already has the Oxford comma, and it appears it didn’t prevent your confusion. If the commas are not effective at their job, I don’t see why one would add them.

Because there is no guarantee that an Oxford comma would be used.

If we were guaranteed that Oxford commas would always be used then there would be no confusion.

I never heard about Turks and Caicos and was able to parse it correctly. Maybe it is because we don't have Oxford comma in Spanish.

Won't anyone think of the neglected ampersand ?

Possibly there would be some confusion here, because my example had the name of 5 islands and three countries!

People aren’t robots. Not enforcing the Oxford comma doesn’t mean you mindlessly write ambiguous sentences.

Style guides that don’t use the Oxford comma will suggest either: adding the comma where necessary to avoid confusion, or rewriting your sentence to be less ambiguous.

That is sensible, but I still don't understand why people take a stand against the comma. Is saving a single tiny character that important even if it is not ambiguous to leave it off? Why would people recommend against its use?

Inconsistency creates confusion as well. If there isn't an example of the Oxford comma increasing ambiguity, I see no reason it shouldn't be used every time.

I agree that people aren't robots, but I disagree with the conclusion. People write ambiguous sentences very often, and I certainly appreciate a very simple rule that avoids needing people to pay mindful attention to list ambiguity.

What is the benefit to not having the oxford comma? Is there a tradeoff I'm missing here, or are people advocating to avoid it simply on the basis of "I don't like it"?

No, they write "We visited Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda and Turks and Caicos". Like people do in Spanish, where the Oxford comma doesn't exist.

No one is "against the Oxford comma".

Some people are against the Oxford comma being mandatory, like me.

I would punctuate your phrase exactly as you did. And at the same time I wouldn't use it in situations where there's no benefit. You, just like all other grammatical devices

I would recommend a list:

We visited:

- Jamaica

- Antigua and Barbuda

- Turks and Caicos

I can't read that sentence no matter where you put the commas, I thought there were 4 entries until I spelled it out to make this comment and wondered why my list was short.

I can’t say I’m very fond of making what ought to be a normal sentence into a fucking PowerPoint presentation.

Note that this was only an internal memo with advice for staff on how to write to the new Health Minister, no a directive on how to communicate with public or patients.

Yeah, they kinda buried the “Officials in Britain routinely circulate guidance on a new minister’s preferred ways of working”.

Sending a memo telling staff how to write to you is a bit of a dick move. If my boss did that I’d be keeping a closer eye on LinkedIn.

This is notes from an incoming conservative minister to the party or civil service staff that work for the department. Before "keeping a close eye on linked in" comes to much they'll probably be gone due to a minor scandal, moved in a reshuffle caused by a more significant scandal, or due to yet another change at the top bringing in a nearly all new team (a prime minister lasting 18 months without a leadership challenge is not all that common at the moment).

If my boss sent me a memorandum about arbitrary grammar preferences, I'd think he either didn't respect my time or thought I was an idiot. If it's so important, then the officials should be leading by example, not browbeating their underlings

We would need next to no punctuation if we could all write as well as Cormac McCarthy. But few can, so I'll keep using Oxford commas.

With Spanish being my first language, this confused me to no end. I constantly found myself reviewing my uni assignments to add a comma before the last item of a list.

This, that, and that other thing.

which I would write as

Esto, eso y eso otro.

...In Spanish. Never really put any effort in understanding why, I just took it on face value and now I know.

All sentences should end with semicolons; Period;

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