The Great Oxford Comma Debate came into full swing in the mid‑to‑late aughts. As Millenials made their way onto the job market and blogs became a thing, the well‑worn rule of preceding the “and” before the final item in a list with a comma started to seem awfully stuffy. It was time to move fast and break things! Marketers fighting to demonstrate their relevance in a new space took their cues from the bloggers and online journalists who had made the Internet their own, and the paradigm shifted: the Oxford comma was out, banished to the realm of rolodexes and Duo-Tangs, to be dusted off and trotted out only when ambiguity threatened. Businesses and institutions followed suit, right up to the fresh‑faced Trudeau government of 2015. A quick glance at the main pages of the Canadian government’s website hammers the point home—there’s nary an Oxford comma to be found.
Translators and revisers tend to be on the conservative end of the usage spectrum. We generally adhere to trusted style guides, some of which have never wavered in their endorsement of the Oxford—or serial—comma. Yet even among translators, the weight of the evidence became increasingly hard to bear. The signs were all around us: the Oxford comma had jumped the shark.
For simple lists, the new rule was fairly easy to apply. If I’m eating apples, oranges and grapes, their conceptual nature as a fruit trio seems clear. I’m not scratching my head wondering if this is indeed a fruit party or if perhaps the apples aren’t off on a lonely plate by themselves while the oranges and grapes canoodle together in the sun, basking in their existence as an indivisible pair. But strike out—as translators so often do—beyond such simple syntactical fare, and it all becomes rather murky. We stare at complex lists, such as requirements for registration, designation, trade reporting and business conduct standards, and wonder: when does ambiguity threaten?
Here’s the thing. As readers, we want to be able to parse a sentence at a glance. As writers and translators, we want our sentences to be clear. And as revisers and editors, we don’t want every list to demand that we distinguish between varying shades of grammatical grey. That’s what the Oxford comma accomplishes. It eliminates hesitation as we write, translate, revise, and—most importantly—read. It clarifies how words in a list are related. Like the lines on a basketball court, it tells us whether the ball is in or out so that we can get on with the game.
This is not to say that time‑saving considerations are all that matter, or that tricky rules should never be applied. But after years of moving fast and breaking things, maybe we’re ready for the pendulum to swing back a ways, to a world where greater clarity prevails.
