I’m Officially Sick of the Oxford Comma!

I’d never heard the term “Oxford comma” before my final year of college. Looking back, that seems weird, because as a student who wrote at an advanced level from an early age, I’d gotten front-loaded into upper-grade writing classes and taught a panoply of grammatical rules throughout school. Only as a college senior, writing a paper for a theatre history course, did a professor circle my missed comma and ding me points for unclear writing.

Since the advent of social media, though, the Oxford comma has become an issue of serious, or anyway po-faced, contention. On one side, Oxford comma proponents shout loudly that it’s the only barrier between meaningful writing and complete gibberish. On the other, “common use” grammarians call this rule pretentious and unnecessary. The most common form of pro-Oxford rule derives from internet memes, because memes are good for simplistic arguments. One common meme looks like this:

Except for one thing: no reasonable person would think the writer meant Washington and Lincoln are rhinoceri. My fifth-grade spelling textbook explained list commas thus: within the list structure, commas hold the place otherwise occupied by the word “and.” Since the final two list items are already separated by the word “and,” the comma is strictly optional. Not that it was necessary, but neither that it was wrong; it simply boiled down to aesthetic choice.

In my experience, there’s two types of grammatical rules. The first is rules we identify by describing how ordinary people use language in ordinary circumstances. We’d call it “a rule,” for instance, that English word order is fundamentally Subject-Verb-Object, “I kick the ball.” We’d note occasions which reverse that order (“The ball is kicked by me”), but we’d consider this non-standard, because it’s wordy and awkward, and we’d give it a special name, “passive voice.”

The second type, is rules we decree from above, and expect others to observe. Invented rules like “You can’t end sentences with a preposition,” or “You can’t split infinitives,” are invented by grammar mavens to create a more specific and precise language. But we feel strong aversion to these rules, partly because we understand they’re artificial: I know you can split infinitives, because I’ve done so many times. But important people tell us we can’t.

Recently, an article crossed my desk entitled Take That, AP Style! Court of Law Rules the Oxford Comma Necessary. The argument isn’t new; the link was nearly three years old. It’s common knowledge that legal documents are ruled by rigid grammar, which courts enforce to eliminate any suggestion of ambiguity. Iron-clad rules are necessary in law. But do we want lawyer-ese to set our civilian writing standards? Must all writing resemble your student loan agreement?

My friend who shared this link wrote: “THE OXFORD COMMA IS CIVILIZATION. This is a hill I will die on, or gladly make *others* die on. And now it is a part of legal record!” I’d question whether my friend’s own writing matches his supposed style, since internet writing encourages hyperbole. Surely my friend doesn’t literally intend to kill anyone over punctuation. Yet if legal contracts are our grammatical model, he’s required to gird himself for battle.

This isn’t academic vapor, friends, battles over grammatical rules matter. Specifically, they matter because they determine who gets to participate in civil debate and leadership. Historically, grammatical “rules” are invented by aristocracy, or those who consider themselves aristocracy, to make language so obscure that ordinary people, with their public-school educations, can never understand. By this technique, the poor, second-language learners, and others who will never savvy all the aristocracy’s rules, will never ascend to leadership.

In fairness, my friend, a schoolteacher, will say he must enforce stricter rules than I, because he must instruct children in the expectations they’ll face in careers, media, and technocracy. As a former teacher myself, I appreciate that. But as I told my students, grammar “rules” aren’t rules like baseball, where we follow rules because they’re rules. Grammar rules are more like etiquette, knowing how to show others respect by living up to their expectations.

When one damn comma becomes life-or-death, and we shame people (or, as in the meme, treat them like they’re too stupid to understand context) over a literal stroke of the pen, we’re functionally silencing those who don’t conform. We’re telling the poor, and people with learning disabilities, that they have no place in public life. We’re creating a more hostile public sphere. And that’s something I, a teacher at heart, can never accept.

See also:
The Grammar Police State
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