The Comma

You wouldn't have any trouble teaching in the Florida public school system, either.

A few weeks ago they gave all the boys and girls an annual standardized test for reading and writing. Something like 70 percent of fourth-graders failed, so the state, going out of its way to make Florida students apparently look smarter than they actually are, changed the grading criteria and . . . poof! . . . suddenly two-thirds got passing grades.

 

I would question whether left fielder-by-committee needs to be hyphenated, myself.

 

What drives me crazy is people who try to use "the strippers, Hitler and Stalin" as an example of why the Oxford comma is oh so necessary. Sure, that sentence is unclear. But the fix isn't to go spraying extra punctuation around like buckshot. It's to reorder the series to remove the inexact phrasing.

 

I agree. This is something that grates my nerves, but I catch myself doing it from time to time. The comma needs to be there, period.

 

I suspect that if one finds oneself forgetting the comma, the parenthetical phrase one has inserted is too long.

 

A comma is just a period with an inferiority complex.

 

That made me day. Thanks.

 

The last 60 pages of 'Ulysses' laughs and laughs and laughs at this thread, laughs at it, laughs, haha, laughs at the idea that the comma has a limit, a range, that the comma can be bounded, that the comma can be held within the small space of your imagination, that the comma can't lay itself down across the longest compound, complex sentences you've ever seen and make order of them, can't fire itself into the middle of some long Kerouac ramble and help a reader find her way out, can't be used to the greater good, can't be poetry in itself or poetry of itself, the comma laughs at that, and laughs at you and at me, haha, and Hemingway laughs too and the rhythm of the laughing was good and it was true and then we drank and slept and the world was as it should have been, perfect.

 

This post stings. Damn, damn, damn.

 

My head hurts.

 

AP does that all the time. Drives me crazy.

 

Boots' favorite punctuation is the colon, of course.