Confessions of a Serial Comma

For those of you who did not find a copy of Little, Brown's 2013 Young Readers catalog in with the advertising supplements of last Sunday's newspaper, clicking here or on the picture to the left will take you to the catalog's two most interesting pages: the pages describing What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World. There's even an excerpt from the book.

And this strikes me as a good place to discuss the serial comma.

The serial comma, for those of you who are not hung up on minutiae, is the comma used before a coordinating conjunction (usually the word "and") just before the final item in a list of three or more things. For example, "Winkin, Blinkin and Nod" does not contain a serial comma, whereas "Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod" does. You can see the difference.

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The serial comma is a cry for help. It screams "STOP ME BEFORE I PAUSE AGAIN!" The serial comma is also known as the Oxford Comma, and I was taught by my fourth grade teacher to use, instead, the Cambridge Emptiness, a blank, comma-less space just before the coordinating conjunction and final item in a list. "Winkin, Blinkin and Nod" contains the Cambridge Emptiness, and, as my teacher explained, using fewer commas makes books substantially lighter, and therefore school book-bags less heavy, resulting in fewer cases of scoliosis in the young. It also saves millions of gallons of printer's ink over the course of a year, at a time when world stockpiles are dangerously low and environmentalists have all but shut down exploratory drilling.

It is, however, the editorial policy at Little, Brown that the serial comma be used, so What We Found in the Sofa came out about a page longer than it really had to be. I protested to my editor at the time, but I finally acquiesced.

I knew enough not to argue that the company logo itself proudly displays the Cambridge Emptiness.