Oxford Comma

[rah]

How flexible of you.

[ColdWizard]

That statement cries out for mod abuse.

[Tupac Shakur]

Using two spaces after a period is as retarded as not using the Oxford comma.

[rah]

Speaking of tolerance, another jag-off sounds out.

[Tupac Shakur]

"Tolerance" is for pussies and retards.

[giblets]

Or people with better things to do than whine about someone else not using a comma...

[Tupac Shakur]

I'm not whining. I'm simply calling them what they are: retards.

[Lorizael]

And even if doing for print, proportional fonts make it redundant, and even in typeset text in the old days they didn't really use it. It was mainly for monospace typewriter fonts.

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm

So you guys arguing for it are mental. Just something you got taught in typing class?

QFT.

[Asher]

Or people with better things to do than whine about someone else not using a comma...

The lack of an Oxford Comma is unambiguously ambiguous.

[giblets]

The lack of an Oxford Comma is unambiguously ambiguous.

Not really.

[Asher]

Really!

Honest-to-God real life example of what the lack of the Oxford Comma can do:

"highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector".

This was from the NYTimes, which does not use the Oxford Comma.

Witness the difference the comma makes:

"highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector".

[Asher]

Or:

Rebecca was proud of her new muffin recipes: blueberry, peanut butter and chocolate chip and coconut.

I went to see Zack, an officer and a gentleman

[Asher]

[giblets]

Really!

Honest-to-God real life example of what the lack of the Oxford Comma can do:


This was from the NYTimes, which does not use the Oxford Comma.

Witness the difference the comma makes:

You would have to be retarded to think they're calling Nelson Mandela an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector. And they could have easily avoided the problem by not listing Nelson Mandela first.

[Darius871]

Unlike the Oxford comma (which reduces ambiguity), an extra space between sentences does not serve any practical purpose.

Using two spaces after a period is as retarded as not using the Oxford comma.

Whoa whoa whoa, now just hold your horses, The two spaces might not add anywhere near as much value as the Oxford comma does, but they at least serve "a" practical purpose of making sentence breaks more conspicuous than otherwise, Depending on the text size, font, degradation by copying/faxing, reader's pace, reader's tardness, etc., there may be a risk that a period-space could look like a comma-space for a fleeting moment, which would throw the flow of the entire paragraph out of wack, Your first thought might be that capitalization of the first letter in the sentence would eliminate this possibility, but it wouldn't always, as the space may be followed by a proper noun, thus removing that potential distinction between the comma-space and period-space (e.g. "Dick went to the store[is it . or is it ,??? oh noes!!!] Jane was there...), Distinguishing the two with distinct space widths eliminated this potential confusion in a far more uniform fashion, At least until having about 18 million different ways of using the English language became the "in" thing,