Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you’re saying.
If you’re going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don’t be a coward and remove the “and”. How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
But… that article says the opposite of what it says it says.
I mean, it claims that the problem was the lack of an Oxford comma (in front of and “or”, rather than an “and”, by the way), but the fact is the ambiguity is caused by the fact that the comma is even an option. The judge is inferring that the comma should have existed and reading the sentence that way.
Notably, if what the writers of the text meant was that “packing for shipment or distribution” is a single clause it also wouldn’t have had a comma.
I can’t stress this enough, the only reason that case went the way it did is that the Oxford comma exists.
Ah, the classic pedantry.
Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you’re saying.
If you’re going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don’t be a coward and remove the “and”. How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/health/oxford-comma-maine-court-case-trnd/index.html
But… that article says the opposite of what it says it says.
I mean, it claims that the problem was the lack of an Oxford comma (in front of and “or”, rather than an “and”, by the way), but the fact is the ambiguity is caused by the fact that the comma is even an option. The judge is inferring that the comma should have existed and reading the sentence that way.
Notably, if what the writers of the text meant was that “packing for shipment or distribution” is a single clause it also wouldn’t have had a comma.
I can’t stress this enough, the only reason that case went the way it did is that the Oxford comma exists.