The more finicky a distinction, the more fanatically people take sides over it. The Oxford comma (aka serial comma, series comma, etc.) is a case in point. Some people – often copy editors or writers – adopt it as a tribal badge and commit to it so completely that it becomes part of their identity. They become true believers.
Being a true believer means adhering to the faith: swearing, hand on stylebook, that the Oxford comma is the best option, end of story. ‘It eliminates ambiguity,’ they assert without qualification. Many claim to use it ‘religiously’, or they convey their devotion to it in analogous secular terms.
Either way, this is dogma, and like all dogma it masks a more complicated (and more interesting) truth.
Yes, the Oxford comma often removes or reduces ambiguity. That’s why I like it and tend to use it. But the key word here is often. The Oxford comma doesn’t always help. In fact, it can also increase ambiguity. Adding it can introduce ambiguity that didn’t exist before.
A recent article at the Oxford Dictionaries blog, on cultural appropriation, has this nice example:
Here’s the image, in case your OS doesn’t format the tweet to show it:
Use of the Oxford comma in this line means that the phrase a woman in a hijab can be parsed as a non-restrictive appositive referring to Kendall Jenner. That’s not how I interpreted it – I read the line as it was intended, with a woman in a hijab as item two in a three-item list, both because I was familiar with the story and because a woman in a hijab would be an improbable appositional phrase in the context.
The writing is fine. My point is that the Oxford comma increases its ambiguity.
It’s not about plausible semantics. A line beloved by Oxford-comma disciples, the apocryphal ‘This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God’, is really only ambiguous theoretically. Few (if any) people would genuinely misread it, given the implications. Ditto the infamous line about Nelson Mandela being an 800-year-old demigod (and maybe a dildo collector).
The Kendall Jenner = a woman in a hijab interpretation is more plausible than either of these.
Reordering the list often resolves the problem. But the ideological debate, such as it is, seldom hinges on real confusion; instead, it relies on the same few humorous and fantastical examples to persuade – or, more commonly, to preach to the choir of the rule-loving faithful. And because the middle ground needs its armoury of entertaining examples too, here are a couple:
As an editor and proofreader, I notice Oxford commas and I notice their absence. And guess what: the potential for confusion or ambiguity is nearly always negligible or non-existent. If it weren’t, the AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style would not be recommending different approaches.
On balance, the serial comma reduces the potential for trouble. But it’s not a panacea, and writers and editors shouldn’t treat it as one. By all means favour the Oxford comma – or not, if that’s your house style or your editorial kink. But think of it as a convention, not a commandment from some mythical Platonic realm of pure clarity.
Language is messy, consisting of patterns with awkward exceptions. This is why you do a disservice to your readers – and to your brain – when you turn a stylistic preference into a rigid rule instead of exercising your judgement, imagination(,) and common sense.
Update:
Another example, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard:
Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek.
Are squirrels the neighbourhood children? Poetically speaking, they could be, but I’m fairly sure that’s not the intent. Without the Oxford comma, there would be no ambiguity. This is not a criticism of the author or the punctuation style, just an observation in service of the discussion above.
When I first saw this tweet from Susie Dent, the Oxford comma led me to briefly assume her new book was called Countdown:
Sentence first 
Interesting that you choose American stylebooks. In North America there is really no debate: you always use it unless you are writing/editing for a newspaper, in which case you never do.
I chose AP and Chicago because they’re major, reputable authorities; and because, both being American, they make for a convenient comparison. (Also, most of this blog’s traffic comes from the US.) I don’t know about there being ‘no debate’: I see some on social media. But as I wrote above, it’s usually more about preaching to the converted.
I learned AP style first, but had to use Chicago in my most recent job and I have to admit that I hated that Oxford comma at first. It went completely against my principles, I believed lol. But over time I’ve come around to see its usefulness, and I choose to use it in my daily life. I agree that language is messy and there’s always room for exceptions to any rule.
Have you heard of this story about the trucking company that may owe its drivers millions in overtime because of confusion over a possible missing Oxford comma? I love the phrase “high-stakes grammar pedantry”! https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.html
That’s good anecdata! It’s funny how attached we become to a certain style, to the point where we strongly resist an alternative – but then we come to accept that option very readily too. I’ve had a similar experience with other usages, e.g. singular data.
The trucking company is an interesting case. I liked the thoughtful coverage at Wordorigins.org and Language Log.
I guess as an editor, when your job depends on your ability to make things right, it’s going to get personal. Why else would we internalize a particular set of rules and defend it so passionately? I’ve been out of the workforce for a few years, and I’m kind of laughing at myself right now for having cared maybe a little too much at times. That’s interesting about the trucking case, I didn’t know all of the details that the court reviewed.
A few days ago a Facebook friend posted an image+caption saying something to the effect of ‘I don’t trust people who don’t use the Oxford comma’. I don’t know what her motivation was. I replied that I don’t trust people who make value judgements based on punctuation choices. She didn’t reply.
That’s a great example of how seriously people take this (or pretend to take it). It becomes a point of public pride to be a member of this discerning tribe that swears by the Oxford comma. But it’s ultimately a trivial thing.
I just made up “The UK, US, and Australian flags are red, white, and blue”, which to me is just *wrong*, though I can’t explain why.
Red, white, and blue and red, white and blue are both fine for me.
Perhaps because the parallelism could imply one flag of each colour. Breaking the parallelism by removing the final comma makes it clearer that all flags use the same three colours.
Good point. But if that were the intended reading, I would expect to see the word respectively after the list.
The example is not a very well thought out sentence to begin with, but removing the Oxford comma doesn’t make it less ambiguous, but merely changes the ambiguity. It makes yet another incorrect interpretation possible: that Kendall Jenner is “a woman wrapped in (a hijab and vaguely positive protest imagery)”, that is, she is wrapped in both a hijab and protest imagery. The sentence could have been improved by the addition of a few words: “In early April, Pepsi ran a controversial advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner which also included a woman in a hijab and some vaguely positive protest imagery”. Isn’t that a little harder to misconstrue?
The word wrapped does not feature in the original line at all, so you may have misconstrued the degrees of ambiguity. Whatever about the plausibility of the phrase “a woman wrapped in … protest imagery”, the phrase “a woman in … protest imagery” scans less well, making this interpretation even less likely.
But this is all beside the point I’m making, which is that turning the Oxford style into an article of blind faith is misguided. Reordering the elements or otherwise recasting the line often fixes the problem, but ultimately what’s needed is more thought and flexibility and less mechanical application of rules.
“Few (if any) people would genuinely misread it” strikes me as indicative of the real nature of the debate. When people cite the “Ayn Rand and God” example (among others) as part of a sincere argument for a stylistic choice they feel strongly about, the value they are advocating is clearly not “writers should avoid ambiguity”, but “writers should avoid unintentional humour”. I don’t think they care about ambiguity per se; in their eyes, it’s a minor sin compared to making the reader laugh out of turn.
Your “woman in a hijab” example lacks the same punch, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that the correct reading is the most natural one. It’s sufficient to make the point that ambiguity exists, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to change any minds.
I don’t think serial-comma devotees who cite the Ayn Rand etc. examples are concerned only (or perhaps even primarily) with avoiding unintentional humour, and hardly or not at all with ambiguity. I think they do care about ambiguity, but in choosing a memorable example to make their point, they weaken their argument because the example is so ludicrous.
I have to wonder if readers who have no idea who Kendall Jenner is would have been confused. Kendall can be a male’s name. If one were to suppose Kendall Jenner is a male, would readers be tripped up by the sentence? Would it have been more confusing? I didn’t read the original article, so I wonder if the surrounding text would have helped make it more clear as to the people in question. Regardless, your main point is spot on–those who are fans of the Oxford comma do tend to use it based on “rules” and don’t always pay attention to whether it is actually needed.
Yes, it’s hard to read a line ‘fresh’, from the point of view of someone with different information, different biases, and so on. Your scare quotes around rules match my own tendency. People would do well to think of them instead as conventions or guidelines.
[…] Find out more about the ambiguous Oxford comma. […]
[…] https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/the-ambiguous-oxford-comma/ […]
[…] Neither its use nor its omission is a universal solution – ambiguity can arise either way, so it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible or dogmatic about it […]
[…] one. Dive in and you’ll find not only endless situations calling for a unique rule but also endless debate about whether each rule is even necessary. […]
Hi Stan, did you hear about this one in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”? Doyle wrote:
Does “the solitary cyclist” refer to Miss Smith? Without the comma, it could not. With the comma, it was ambiguous enough to keep the fan club arguing for 69 years, until a manuscript was discovered proving that it doesn’t. From Futility Closet via Language Hat.
I did hear about it, via both blogs, but I had completely forgotten about it. And I don’t think I’ve read that story. Thank you for adding the example here: it’s most appropriate.
Ambiguity isn’t necessarily bad here, and Doyle might even have intended it. It’s the opening of a mystery story, so it’s appropriate to use a subtly ambiguous description to mislead the reader, then reveal a twist.
[…] – unless the unwelcome deletion or addition of an Oxford comma interferes with the sense; ditto the use of that or which. This may be an apt time to quote from […]
John McIntyre linked here recently. I can’t comment on his post, so I’ll comment here. Do you know which style emerged first, or whether the two have marched hand-in-hand since the invention of commas? I suspect that the serial comma emerged first, because people used to write eg “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three”.
It’s a good question. This article looks at its modern history as an element of codified style, but it doesn’t resolve the question of its origin. I suspect the practice of including the Oxford comma evolved later, but that’s just a hunch.
For interested readers: John McIntyre’s post is here. If you’re in the EU, as I am, you may need to dig around to access it; the Baltimore Sun shows no signs of making its content available to us.
Yes, it’s an excellent question, and should be put in context: punctuation in general was heavier through the 19th century, and got lighter (in many contexts) in the 20th, as Stan has discussed. In 1926 serial commas were in upheaval, according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage:
American newspapers had apparently settled on a comma-light style by the 1950s; there are AP and UPI stylebooks from that time saying “use commas sparingly” and “x, y and z”.
I think it’s fair to say the serial comma is the older style—it was endorsed by 18th-century bigwigs Lowth and Murray—but it also wasn’t always as rigid as fanatics want to make it today. Both “red, white and blue” and “red, white, and blue” are well represented in old books.
I found in the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice (Project Gutenberg): “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. *Her* mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.”
Keith Houston’s book Shady Characters has good background on how the comma emerged and evolved, but not the serial comma, unfortunately. I’ll keep a look out for any detail on this.
Project Gutenberg can’t be used as evidence of such fine details of punctuation: they don’t try to conform their e-texts to any specific printed edition, and indeed don’t even indicate which edition they used. Their purpose is to provide accessible free texts, not authoritative ones. See Language Hat: Punctuation Identification for more.
As it happens, archive.org has images of some 19th-century editions of Pride and Prejudice which do have the same commas in the sentences you quote — but that’s not enough, you’ll need to examine every list in the book to determine whether the publisher used serial commas consistently.
[…] are some cases where using the Oxford comma could make a sentence more ambiguous. Check out Stan Carey’s blog post on the ambiguity to see what we […]
When there is a comma in a serial list, you separate list items with a semicolon, so the Pepsi add example would actually be:
…featuring Kendall Jennifer, a woman in a hijab; and vaguely positive protest imagery.
You can, but it’s not mandatory. Kendall Jennifer was not the woman in a hijab, in case you missed that. Using the semicolon imposes that erroneous interpretation.
Removing the oxford comma will not clear up any of these. only the serial semicolon will.
Reordering the elements is often a simpler and more effective approach.