Talk:2995: University Commas
As Wikipedia notes, the Harvard comma is actually a thing, and synonymous with the Oxford comma. It's hard to understand whether Randall was just ignoring that. It's interesting to also look at how the various commas are meaningful. For instance, the Yale comma here appears to be just plain ungrammatical, you'd never put a comma between a verb and a its direct object; similarly the Cambridge comma and Princeton commas are ungrammatical, you'd never put one after the word "and." The Stanford comma is unambiguously normal and it's not clear how you could have such a list without it (absent replacement with a [Stanford?] semicolon). The Columbia comma is being used to separate "mac and cheese" into "mac, and[,] cheese" which changes the semantic meaning (arguably into something meaningless, but maybe we're listing Apple Computers or even Macintosh apple fruit abbreviated). The MIT comma is a cute programming joke for multiline lists. Maybe there are hidden trick meanings (like MIT) I'm missing. JohnHawkinson (talk) 23:03, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
- On their own, few of them are intrinsically bad, in the right context.
- "Please, buy" - valid comma. Prefixed subclause (general plea).
- "Please buy, apples" - valid comma (more specific plea).
- "apples, mac" - valid comma (list-type).
- "mac, and" - valid comma (potentially a conjunctive sub-clause).
- "mac and, cheese" - valid comma (potentially a post-conjunctive sub-clause).
- "and cheese, milk" - valid comma (follow-up sub-clause).
- "cheese, milk, and" - Oxford comma. (Thus invalid, by default. IMO.)
- "milk and, bread." - ...would be valid, as above, except for the sentence ending.
- "and bread,." - Ok. Definitely the worst. (Except for the Oxford Comma, which is still worserer!)
- Obviously, combinations of them (or counterpart lack of them, in some cases) can clash badly. Some can work well together, but using ()s, ;s or feetnete* is often better than diving in and out of sub-clauses in the midst of a comma-bound list and potentially making it ambiguous whether you're diving in/out of a clarifying aside or replacing a non-terminating conjunction or perhaps one of the other usages to which a comma might apply.
- * Or just generally rewriting a multi-clausal sentence completely! 172.70.86.22 23:30, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
