Oxford Comma

Last year, I got whacked in the head and spent three months in a comma.  This time, I'm aiming for a semicolon (nobody ever wants to spend any time at all in colons. That's what they get for sharing a name with an organ full of excrement.)

As you might have guessed, the theme of today's rant  is the importance of m's!  Except that it isn't.  It's commas; specifically, the Oxford comma, that subject of grammarian debate.  Supposedly, it's one of those stylistic choices.  You aren't 100% required to have it.  Neither, ideally, will anyone gripe if you DO.  Please note the "ideally;" you won't believe the number of high school English papers I got back looking like murder implements because some lunatic of an instructor had slaughtered all the poor innocent Oxford commas with a red pen.



Sometime between twelfth grade (man, "twelfth" is difficult to spell, on one cup of coffee) and freshman year of university, I stopped using it, and lo and behold every single professor who read my work slathered it in red circles where they opined - except as fact, because a professor's opinion, like a boss or a parent's, is always fact - the missing Oxford commas ought to be!   Decisive individual that I am, I proceeded to use the Oxford comma.  Sometimes.  Ideally, I remembered which professors wanted it and which didn't, but college was, well, college, and thence kind of a haze of caffeine and sleeplessness so far all I know I gave some poor long-suffering soul of a freaking Stats professor or something ten pages, double-spaced, of Oxford commas*, all in a series of lists:

"I bought some pies, a pineapple, and jelly."

"She dashed madly across the field, pursued by two bears, a nun, and a muskrat."

"We need a cheese grater, a lemon peeler, and a bottle of rum."

And so on and so forth.

If so, will someone please lend me a time machine? My younger self needs his ears  boxed for missing the real point of the Oxford comma, which, when it comes right down to it, is the real point of any grammatical rule (and most non-grammatical ones, too, come to think of it) that have a point to begin with.  The point is to prevent yourself from sounding as if you're from another planet.

Subtract the Oxford comma from your book's dedication, and suddenly nobody notices that you actually wrote the Great American Novel, because they're too distracted by "I'd like to thank my parents, Greebo the cat and David Bowie."

It gets almost as weird with food.  "We ordered pizza with pepperoni and onions and some ice cream." WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

And this, folks, is why I've migrated off the fence and into Oxford Comma's back yard, and can now regularly be found outside her window with a boom-box and a bouquet of fresh-picked asterisks.

*I think the prime purpose of your Bachelor's degree is to teach you how to not screw up your Master's**, or at least how to screw it up in a different way.

**Someone ought to write a story about education, personified as an errant twenty-something who finds refuge from a lonely, passionless life in the welcoming arms of the local kink community.***

***There is something profoundly wrong with me.