Some people love the Oxford comma.
Just ask Vox's copy editors, Rob Lowe and James Van Der Beek.
Wait.
Add a comma.
Just ask Vox's copy editors, Rob Lowe, and James Van Der Beek.
The Oxford comma, serial comma, whatever you want to call it comma is that comma plunked
down before the "and" on a list.
People who like it say it adds clarity and makes reading things easier.
But organizations like the AP don't use it in their style book.
They're what's technically known as...wrong.
It's a heated debate.
There's a whole Twitter account that just asked celebrities about their Oxford comma
preferences — that's how we know Rob Lowe is "pro" and Van Der Beek thinks only "animals"
would ditch the Oxford comma.
But where did the world's most controversial punctuation come from?
Oxford is not the whole answer.
Communication researcher Jasso Lamberg wanted to know: who invented it?
It required a kind of detective hunt.
"I tried Googling it and I just couldn't find the actual history of it."
Usually, he checks things on the Oxford English Dictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary
didn't have a good answer about the Oxford comma.
"So according to the OED, the first recorded use of this term is supposed to be Peter H.
Sutcliffe's book from 1978."
The phrase "Oxford comma" was kind of new, but could its usage really be that recent?
In his book, Sutcliffe explains the comma came from rulebooks written a hundred years
ago.
A guy named F.H.
Collins wrote those rulebooks, codifying the punctuation that Lupita Nyong'o said she couldn't
live without.
But that's not all — Collins said he got the idea from a letter from Herbert Spencer,
who thought the comma was key in "marking out the elements of a thought."
And at the time, Herbert Spencer was a legend.
Charles Darwin did not come up with the term "survival of the fittest" — Herbert Spencer
did.
Spencer was a classic Victorian generalist.
He was a jack of all trades who did philosophy and science.
In the 1860s, Darwin, Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and others all pushed evolution into the mainstream
of culture.
Here's Darwin and Spencer, just chattin'.
Spencer's survival of the fittest expanded to social Darwinism, the competition between
people, not just species.
He was massively influential, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of his books and inspiring
authors, like H.G. Wells's divergent races in "The Time Machine."
But over time, his worldview lost to the competition.
Darwin became the name people associated with evolution.
Spencer turned into an often maligned figure in philosophy and a footnote to the culture
at large.
Social Darwinism became of a piece with eugenics in the popular culture.
But Spencer really did believe in efficiency and clarity.
Our culture and science have changed from a mutton-chopped Victorian's theories, but
our sentences still need to be clear.
And that's why the Oxford comma is still the right choice for my coworkers, Neil de Grasse
Tyson and Adam Savage.
Uh, comma please.
OK, so what is the best argument against an Oxford comma.
After all, there are people who don't like it, from the AP to Talib Kweli — who is
the son of of an English professor.
And they might say that the Oxford comma can't hide bad writing.
So, for example, if you looked at our sentence in the beginning of the video and made "copy
editors" singular, even an Oxford comma would make it look like Rob Lowe had a job at Vox
which, sadly, he does not.
I, however, have to side with Spencer, because in that letter to Collins he said that commas
equal pauses.
And when you have a list, you want a pause for each item, and only an Oxford comma can
do that.
So that hopefully will settle it and there will never be another argument about this
ever again.
There...yeah...