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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Even though the Oxford comma has fallen out of fashion, there are a few cases where you really need it. My favorite example is the old joke:

There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

Leave out the comma and it makes a mess of things:

There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors.

Don't take my word for it. Read both versions out loud, pausing for each comma, and not pausing where the comma was removed.

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There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.

When reading a written work aloud: is it typical that the decision to pause before the last item is determined by the Oxford comma (or lack thereof)? Personally, I pause there regardless, for the same duration that I pause between items throughout the rest of the series.

With Oxford comma: "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin." [three distinct items in the list]

Without Oxford comma: "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin."[two named items in the list]

Reading with or without the pause is natural either way. And massively changes the meaning of the sentence.

I cannot see a way that those sentences do not both mean the same (nonsensical) thing involving strippers, JFK and Stalin.

I think that your analysis in [] is wrong. Your second example says two named items but it still has three - strippers, JFK and Stalin.

> I cannot see a way that those sentences do not both mean the same (nonsensical) thing involving strippers, JFK and Stalin.

This specific example is nonsensical to demonstrate the possible confusion, but this sort of confusion is really common.

> I think that your analysis in [] is wrong. Your second example says two named items but it still has three - strippers, JFK and Stalin.

No, in the second example, JFK and Stalin are two instances of strippers. So there are three nouns, but only two people.

In the sentence with ann Oxford comma, there are a group of strippers, plus two men.

In the sentence without, there are two strippers, the first named JFK, the second named Stalin.

Here’s a drawing to help… http://helveticka.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/oxford...

Without Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper and Stalin." [three distinct items in the list]

With Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper, and Stalin."[two named items in the list with an appositive affirming that we're talking about JFK the stripper and not the former president]

Yes, changing the order and the number of items (plural strippers in original to singular stripper in yours) changes the meaning. That is unsurprising.

You can't always know whether you've reached the last item in the list or whether it has just turned out that you're halfway through reading the last item, which is a compound clause. Unless, that is, serial commas are reliably present.

> When reading a written work aloud: is it typical that the decision to pause before the last item is determined by the Oxford comma (or lack thereof)?

People are sometimes careless when they write and when they read but a comma does indicate a short pause. So yes, strictly speaking, the “decision to pause” (which is not really a decision) is determined by the presence of a comma.

Often the presence of a pause changes the meaning of the list; there are several examples in this thread. In these cases, adding or removing a comma does alter the meaning of the sentence and should be avoided.

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