And there was the country-and-western singer who “was joined by his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.”
The bottom line is to choose one and be consistent and try not to make a moral issue out of it. Or is it? Maybe it’s better to judge each series on its merits, applying the serial comma where it’s needed and suppressing it where it’s not. Many newspapers, both American and British, do not use the serial comma, which underscores the idea that the news is meant to be read fast, in the dead-tree version or on the screen, because it’s not news for long. It’s ephemeral. Print—or, rather, text—should be streamlined and unencumbered. Maybe the day is coming when the newsfeed-style three dots (ellipsis) between items, like the eternal ribbon of news circling the building at One Times Square or the CNN crawl, will dominate, and all text will look like Céline. Certainly advertising—billboards, road signs, neon—repels punctuation. Leaving out the serial comma saves time and space. The editors of Webster’s Third saved eighty pages by cutting down on commas.
But suppose you’re not in a hurry. Suppose you move your lips when you read, or pronounce every word aloud in your head, and you’re reading a Victorian novel or a history of Venice. You have plenty of time to crunch commas. If I worked for a publication that did not use the serial comma, I would adjust—convert from orthodox to reform—but for now I remain loyal to the serial comma, because it actually does sometimes prevent ambiguity and because I’ve gotten used to the way it looks. It gives starch to the prose, and can be very effective. If a sentence were a picket fence, the serial commas would be posts at regular intervals.
I feel my hackles rise, however, when I hear people refer to the serial comma as the Oxford comma. Why does Oxford get all the credit? Why does the stricter, more conservative choice belong to the university that gave us the eponymous shirt with the button-down collar and the androgynous lace-up shoe? Why not the Harvard comma, or the Rutgers comma, or the Cornhusker comma? I went up to Oxford once—or do I mean down? It was on a day trip from London, and I had a look at the cottage gardens and stopped in a pub for lunch—thatched roofs, separate entrances for ladies and for farm workers—and I don’t know when I’ve felt so alienated.
The Oxford comma refers to the Oxford University Press, whose house style is to use the serial comma. (The public-relations department at Oxford doesn’t use it, however. Presumably PR people see it as a waste of time and space. The business end of these operations is always in a hurry and does not approve of clutter. The serial comma is a pawn in the war between town and gown.) To call it the Oxford comma gives it a bit of class, a little snob appeal. Kids use it (or, rather, “reference” it) on their Twitter bios and their match.com profiles to show that they have standards. Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out. The British get to have it both ways: they deride us Americans for our allegiance to a comma that they named and then rejected as pretentious.
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