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[Remuthra]

I always use the Oxford comma, because it's quite irritating for me when I see it missing. It's a matter of pacing; 'Apples, orangesandbananas' is a bad way of pacing a list in my opinion. If the comma is removed, it signifies the joining of the objects into one point of the list.
For example: 'She was cunning, nimble, and fluid.' as opposed to 'She was cunning, nimble and fluid.'.

[Skyrunner]

That's usually why I use the comma.

[Gervassen]

That's actually punctuation, rather than grammar. Point of fact.

[fqllve]

There was another case people use commas or not. I think it was having looong clauses separated by commas... Hrrn. Can't think of an example.

Yeah, really long clauses joined by a coordinator can use commas, even though you wouldn't normally use one. So you could use a comma before the and in "He would incessantly talk about all that nonsense that seemed to interest him so fervently and I wasn't sure if I could take it anymore."

What's wrong with the final comma? O_o

Basically some people argue that it's ambiguous. If you set something off with commas it's going to look like apposition. From my example earlier in the thread:

"Jane, her mother, and her grandmother" could be read as either "Jane and her mother and her grandmother" or "Jane, her mother (Jane is her mother), and her grandmother."

But without the serial comma you end up with apposition in circumstances like: "Jane's brothers, Tommy and Joe" Which could be read as Jane's brothers being Tommy and Joe or as a list.

Pretty much any time you use commas around a noun there is some chance that someone somewhere will read it as apposition. The thing is, that chance is very very small.

That's actually punctuation, rather than grammar. Point of fact.

99% of grammar questions are about punctuation. The other 1% are about hopefully.

[misko27]

99% of grammar questions are about punctuation. The other 1% are about hopefully.

What about Participles? Or Infinitives? Or that phrase which I can remember, for anything like this "Having been decieved" or "While Appreciating the thought"
 
Latin class is proven to increase your Grammer ability in english by 150%.

[Remuthra]

99% of grammar questions are about punctuation. The other 1% are about hopefully.

What about Participles? Or Infinitives? Or that phrase which I can remember, for anything like this "Having been decieved" or "While Appreciating the thought"
 
Latin class is proven to increase your Grammer ability in english by 150%.

I can confirm this, everything you learn in English you learn in Latin at least 6 months earlier.

[Starver]

I don't know why people stand so strongly on the Oxford comma issue.

Personally?  Iwastaughttodoitthatway.

Logically (i.e. how I justify my 'belief' in my approach), I treat the comma as a conjunction-substitute.  "There are lions and tigers and bears [oh my!]" => "There are lions, tigers and bears"  The final "and" is not substituted, thus no comma.

Verbally, "There are lions <pause> tigers and bears."  No significant pause between "tigers" and "and bears" (when spoken... the Ozish refrain is of course artificially constrained to a rhythm, just failing to turn into actual musical lyrics).  To suit those that suggest the comma is a pause substitute.  Which is a contentious issue which causes child learners of grammar to over-use commas[1].  OTOH, I over-use... ellipses!

For lists that substitute all with punctuation (comma or non-comma) and lose the conjunctions altogether, along with perhaps adding other listing features, then it's "There were -- Lions, tigers, bears." or "Common dangers: Lions, from Africa; Tigers, mainly indian; Bears, all kinds except polar, which aren't as good at sneaking up on you upon a bright moonlit night." or even "Beware, Dorothy!  Lions!  Tigers!  Bears!"

XD I just use whichever one I take a fancy to at the moment >_>

XD and >_> indeed.  You may well screw your eyes up and then revert to looking shifty.  Be consistent.  First to yourself, but with a mind to modify that to suit your target publication's chosen style.  Switching between the two without reason (especially in the same text) makes almost certain that when the ambiguous situations arise that the wrong sense can end up being read.

(Not quite the same thing, but I had an awful habit of re-writing those SOPs/P&Ps of my company that I was told to review in GB English instead of US English.  Spellings of an "-our" and "-re" and "-ise" ending instead of "-or", "-er" and "-ize" ending (yes, "-ize" is often a valid British English variant to match the US, but I still converted them because Webster-spellings may be more phonetic but they often 'look' ugly, subjectively of course... c.f. "sulfur"/"sulphur" as well, and "aluminum" and "aluminium"[3] as well) and things like adding in a "to" to the (to me) godsawful phrasing "write <me|target>".  Also made sure was set up for A4 instead of Letter (or at least worked in both paper-schemes).  I imagine my US colleagues (especially those at the head office) had fun converting some of those back when it was time for them to review them at a future time, whether straight after I'd looked at them or a couple of years down the line at a scheduled review.  I'm not 'proud' of doing that, but I don't consider it a problem either.  And even consider it useful, meaning that both my revamps and reviews at the time and those that happen later on are more thorough.)

I think I do tend to have the final comma, though. Apples, pears, and triages. What's wrong with the final comma? O_o

Already mentioned my reasons against it.  Do what you like, though.  Oxford rules say "yes, yes, and yes!", all the way.

There was another case people use commas or not. I think it was having looong clauses separated by commas... Hrrn. Can't think of an example.

Maybe the "not for rhythmic non-list breaths, but for logical sub-clausing (which may involve a breathy-pause)" concept as mentioned?  I'm often writing long and complex sentences (as you can see).  Where I think it's ambiguous I may use other methods (e.g. parenthesis (and sometimes nested)) instead of, ambiguously_, or perhaps even totally misleadingly_,, by commas alone.  Breaking out to footnotes (see below) when it becomes a serious diversion and especially one which should, perhaps, even be read as an afterthought or annotation.  Other [abbrev=...like this one]methods[/abbrev] are useful when one has access to BBCode.

Thus ends the first lesson.  You may now forget (or ignore) anything that you haven't already forgotten (or ignored) in what I've just written.


[1] Along the lines of, as I recall from several decades ago when I was in primary school, one of my classmates taking literally the axiom "A paragraph should be about four lines in length," and thus would write for four lines (to the nearest predicted sentence break) and then start a new paragraph.  Because it was "the rule".  If she had been told to look for (or create) a natural break[2]

[2] Of course, this was hand-written and not word-processed and you know how sentences run on and on and on at that age with very little regard for how the sense of what has been written continues and as such you end up with a long sentence that has apparently no end especially when you can just keep inserting subclauses (and sub-subclauses!) with or without appropriate commas that you might go back and dot in later on or something but you're also using conjunctions and conjunction-like continuation methodology in a stream of immature consciousness so that one minute you're writing about where you went on your holidays and then you're saying as how your dog was sick on the floor which naturally leads onto your favourite colour being blue and there once was a man who lived in the cushions of your sofa but then a tautologically magical wizard came along and.... <intake of breath>   ...anyway, YGTI.  And at least this particular schoolmate limited herself to four-line paragraphs.  (My handwriting is/was/weill-ever-more-be-so very squashed up and thin so I tend to fit about twice as much (barely legible) handwriting on a text-book line as anyone else, so it could have been worse had I made the error. )

[3] Yes, I'm aware that etymologically the US spelling is the "original", and is destined to last and indeed prosper among CanadianScottish space-professionals until at least Stardate 8390, but it doesn't work for me at all.

[fqllve]

What about Participles? Or Infinitives? Or that phrase which I can remember, for anything like this "Having been decieved" or "While Appreciating the thought"

Having been deceived is a gerund, technically functioning as a participle. But nah, most people don't really ask about participles and things like that.

Verbally, "There are lions <pause> tigers and bears."  No significant pause between "tigers" and "and bears" (when spoken... the Ozish refrain is of course artificially constrained to a rhythm, just failing to turn into actual musical lyrics).  To suit those that suggest the comma is a pause substitute.  Which is a contentious issue which causes child learners of grammar to over-use commas[1].  OTOH, I over-use... ellipses!

There's no pause before lions, either. The difference isn't rhythmic, it's tonic, and it's subtle/nonexistent. Actually there is more likely to be a pause before bears when it's only "tigers and bears." Rather the argument could be made (I wouldn't make it because it's sketch as hell) that the comma indicates that the final element is part of the same tone group as the preceding whereas it might not be with only two elements. That is technically how I use commas, personally, although not really in this case. I use the serial comma because I think it looks better, but in most instances I use commas to delineate tone groups. Obviously that doesn't delineate but includes, so that's why I don't sue it that way. However there is a difference between how "Tigers and bears" and "Lions, tigers, and bears" are spoken.

The issue is pretty much a non-issue to me, though, but I take a laissez-faire attitude to punctuation in general.

[Starver]

Verbally, "There are lions <pause> tigers and bears."  No significant pause between "tigers" and "and bears" (when spoken... the Ozish refrain is of course artificially constrained to a rhythm, just failing to turn into actual musical lyrics).  To suit those that suggest the comma is a pause substitute.  Which is a contentious issue which causes child learners of grammar to over-use commas[1].  OTOH, I over-use... ellipses!

There's no pause before lions, either. The difference isn't rhythmic, it's tonic, and it's subtle/nonexistent. Actually there is more likely to be a pause before bears when it's only "tigers and bears."

I think I forgot to say "but YMMV" when I meant to, given that rhythms and emphases of language vary as much as accents.  (Somewhat linked, actually, but not exclusively so.)  Obviously something's different between our respective treatments as "Tigers and <beat> bears" doesn't seem to work for me.  Or I may be misunderstanding, in which case ignore me.



(Do you want to read the umpteen paragraphs I then continued to write? No, probably not.... so snipped.  Though I'll go so far as to say that (for me) the tonal differences between "Tigers and bears" and "Lions, tigers and bears" aren't really as significant as the overall context's influence, as far as I can tell from repeating the phrases in various simulated situations.)

[fqllve]

I think I forgot to say "but YMMV" when I meant to, given that rhythms and emphases of language vary as much as accents.  (Somewhat linked, actually, but not exclusively so.)  Obviously something's different between our respective treatments as "Tigers and <beat> bears" doesn't seem to work for me.  Or I may be misunderstanding, in which case ignore me.

Yeah that was my fault, it would actually be "tigers <beat> and bears" the beat coming from the emphasis on the and (or maybe emphasis on bears, but the beat still comes before the and). And emphasis being somewhat less common in a series than with just two elements in the noun phrase.

(Do you want to read the umpteen paragraphs I then continued to write? No, probably not.... so snipped.  Though I'll go so far as to say that (for me) the tonal differences between "Tigers and bears" and "Lions, tigers and bears" aren't really as significant as the overall context's influence, as far as I can tell from repeating the phrases in various simulated situations.)

Well, context is king. I always say that context is much better at clarifying intentions than any bit of grammar or punctuation, and like I said, the tonal differences are subtle to nonexistent depending on the situation, content, and context. But when people justify the serial comma with a pause, to my mind they are responding to those differences, because the ear responds to tone changes a lot like it does actual pauses.

[Gervassen]

and like I said,

... as I said ...

[Il Palazzo]

and like I said,

... as I said ...

You stodgy conservative you.

https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/like.html

[fqllve]

and like I said,

... as I said ...

I'm a descriptivist, so usage is king. If this were a formal setting? Sure. But that post was already more than pretentious enough.

[Gervassen]

Descriptivists are a confused breed. What they really mean to say is that there's no usage standard at all, not even based on some mythical "common usage" and whatever can be understood is fine. Since the English language can hardly be said to exist as a unified thing to be described, you either set up shop with prescriptions, or you're not in the game.

[Gervassen]

and like I said,

... as I said ...

You stodgy conservative you.

https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/like.html

I can honestly say that that man has no idea what he's babbling about. He should not be listened to, and his books not bought.

He pretends that some people object to these:
"It feels like spring."
"She treats her dog like a baby."

In reality, that's not the gist of the complaint. Both of those are correct, and always have been correct.

"As" takes a clause, and "like" takes a noun phrase. If he can't express this simple distinction succinctly, he's not worth reading in the overall on other points, either.