Oxford Comma

[giblets]

Don't English speakers have some pansy Royal Academy of the English Language in which a group of old English men tell you how to talk and write?

No. What a silly concept.

[The Mad Monk]

whoa, wait: you mean there are people out there who don't put two spaces after a period? when the **** did that become optional?

I don't know, but my email program won't let it stand, to my everlasting annoyance.

Oxford comma suppoerter, BTW.

[Lorizael]

Well here you're separating main clauses. It's a bit different. Actually I don't see why you need the comma before the last and.

Yeah, my example was intended to disprove you, but it kind of backfired. I've changed my mind and agree with your premise.

[The Mad Monk]

Don't English speakers have some pansy Royal Academy of the English Language in which a group of old English men tell you how to talk and write?

No that's the French.

The English equivalent is The Oxford English Dictionary, which is a monument to the mutability of the language.

[The Mad Monk]

A Dictionary, then, according to that idea of it which
seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is
an inventory of the language : much more indeed, but this
primarily, and with this only at present we will deal. It
is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a
language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick
and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once
go astray. The business which he has undertaken is to
collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad,
whether they do or do not commend themselves to his
judgment, which, with certain exceptions hereafter to be
specified, those writing in the language have employed.
He is an historian of it, not a critic. The delectus ver-
boram, on which so much, on which nearly everything in
style depends, is a matter with which he has no concern.
There is a constant confusion here in men's minds. There
are many who conceive of a Dictionary as though it had
this function, to be a standard of the language ; and the
pretensions to be this which the French Dictionary of the
Academy sets up, may have helped on this confusion. It is
nothing of the kind. A special Dictionary may propose to
itself to be such, to include only the words on which the
compiler is willing to set the mark of his approval, as being
fit, and in his judgment the only fit, to be employed by
those who would write with purity and correctness. Of the
probable worth of such a collection I express no opinion.
Those who desire, are welcome to such a book : but for
myself I will only say that I cannot understand how any
writer with the smallest confidence in himself, the least
measure of that vigour and vitality which would justify
him in addressing his countrymen in written or spoken
discourse at all, should consent in this matter to let one
self-made dictator, or forty, determine for him what words
he should use, and what he should forbear from using. At
all events, a Dictionary of the English language such a
work would not have the slightest pretence to be called.
What sort of completeness, or what value, would a Greek
lexicon possess, a Scott and Liddell, from whose pages all
the words condemned by Phrynichus and the other Greek
purists, and, so far as style is concerned, many of them
justly condemned, had been dismissed? The lexicographer
is making an inventory; that is his business; he may
think of this article which he inserts in his catalogue, that
it had better be consigned to the lumber-room with all
speed, or of the other, that it only met its deserts when it
was so consigned long ago; but his task is to make his
inventory complete. Where he counts words to be needless,
affected, pedantic, ill put together, contrary to the genius
of the language, there is no objection to his saying so ; on
the contrary, he may do real service in this way : but let
their claim to belong to our book -language be the humblest,
and he is bound to record them, to throw wide with an im-
partial hospitality his doors to them, as to all other. A
Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a
nation contemplated from one point of view ; and the
wrong ways into which a language has wandered, or been
disposed to wander, may be nearly as instructive as the
right ones in which it has travelled : as much may be
learned, or nearly as much, from its failures as from its
successes, from its follies as from its wisdom.

This is an excerpt from a paper, by Richard Chenevix Trent, D.D., that was read before the Philological Society of London in 1857, and is considered the start of the effort to create the OED.

[Krill]

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,

This post is ****ing retarded.

[The Mad Monk]

How so?

[Krill]

How many full stops are there in that paragraph?

[The Mad Monk]

That wasn't retarded, that was clever.

[-Jrabbit]

Using commas rather than periods in that post was not a good way for Darius to make his point IMHO.

The nice thing about the 2-space issue is that a simple search/replace can make text publication-ready. Unfortunately, the wide variety of usage and phrasing dictates that Oxford comma usage is much more difficult to automate with 100% accuracy.

Shall we now digress to a discussion of the semi-colon?

[The Mad Monk]

That's what you have after a colostomy, right?

[Tupac Shakur]

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,

No; the period and the capitalized word at the beginning of the next sentence accomplish that quite effectively on their own. You're just inventing justifications for incorrect personal preference now.

[Tupac Shakur]

This post is ****ing retarded.

QFT

Using commas rather than periods in that post was not a good way for Darius to make his point IMHO.

Agreed. I didn't even notice the first time through because the capitalized word at the beginning of a new sentence is so effective at alerting the reader to a sentence break that you don't even need to use periods for that purpose, let alone a completely superfluous second space.

[Dinner]

Drake is a communist and probably a kiddy diddler.

[Lorizael]

Shall we now digress to a discussion of the semi-colon?

Semi-colons are easy; I don't know why people screw them up so much.

That's what you have after a colostomy, right?