More and more writers and publishers are joining newspaper editors in the belief that the second-last item in a series needs no comma after it. They would write:
of the people, by the people and for the people
or
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short
or
Walk one block, make a left, go to the end of the street and
jump in the lake.
They say the “and” sufficiently separates the last from the second-last item, so a comma is superfluous. But this is a mistake. It is not the function of the “and” to separate the last two items; it is to unite all of them. The comma before “and” does what its kindred commas do in the rest of the series: separate each item from the next.
That comma must also separate the second-last item from the “and” itself, which must not be taken as uniting the last two items more intimately than it unites all the items in the series together. It is a false argument, in other words, to say that because a list of only two items needs no comma before the “and” a list of three or more should conclude the same way. For example:
The Garden was inhabited by the serpent, Adam and Eve.
This is a terrible sentence, but perfectly correct according to the anti-comma school. “Adam and Eve” is a closely unified phrase sanctioned by long usage, and its appearance at the end makes the sentence sound unfinished. We expect another item, say, “the serpent, Adam and Eve, and Lilith,” so we have been misled into misreading it.
The Garden was inhabited by the serpent, Adam, and Eve.
This is a good sentence: note how it separates Adam from Eve, seemingly for dramatic effect. The anti-comma school would ban such sentences. If one wanted to keep “Adam and Eve” together without a comma one could write, “the serpent, and Adam and Eve,” or “Adam and Eve, and the serpent,” but the anti-commatists would eliminate those commas, too, and ruin the effects. By making it a rule that the last two items must lack a comma between them, this school has restricted the expressive resources of English; it has hamstrung writers in a small but sometimes crucial way.
If you say a sentence with a series aloud, moreover, you will pause before the “and” for the same little beat that you pause at each earlier comma, so a comma there reflects normal oral practice. It is bad to have a writing convention that departs from such usage.
Law firms insist on being exceptions to this rule:
Airdale, Airdale, Whippet and Pug
But few lawyers remember how to write.
It is sometimes essential to have the final comma or confusion will result, especially when the items in the series are themselves compound:
We invited President and Mrs. Obama, the Viscount and Viscountess
Poobah, Ed and Myrtle Jones, Adele, and Donald Trump.
Note what happens, for a startling moment, if you leave out the last comma. Another example, borrowed from an older handbook on usage:
Like Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill, though they were responsible to
democratic institutions, had extraordinary powers.
Under the rule that drops, or even permits dropping, the final comma, this sentence will certainly be misread as far as “had,” as the three political leaders will be taken as belonging to one series, all of them the object of “like,” in which case there is no subject of “had” and the seeming sentence is a fragment. But in fact “Roosevelt and Churchill” is the subject of “had,” and only “Hitler” is the object of “like.” Writers are well advised to avoid sentences like this, alas, because the habit of dropping the comma has bred conflicting expectations; if everyone kept the comma, such sentences would not have ambiguities hovering over them. Here is an example from a recent book about British history:
Three new earls were created, in Chester, Hereford and Shrewsbury,
and Pembroke, delegated to subdue as much Welsh territory as they
could, . . .
If the comma after “Shrewsbury” were omitted you would have no idea whether “Shrewsbury” belongs with the preceding “Hereford” or the following “Pembroke.” The sentence is correctly punctuated, but in our comma-evaporating atmosphere some readers will halt, wonder if there weren’t really four earls, scratch their heads over the extra “and,” and so on, before backtracking and getting it right. This perfectly good sentence deserves a better fate. An example from another recent book: “At the moment we have two, the two greatest children’s poets since Blake, Ted Hughes and Charles Causley.” Ted Hughes and Charles Causley, that is, are the two greatest children’s poets since Blake. The sentence is correctly punctuated, but in these comma-losing days readers might well read the three poets as in series, and then wonder why the two greatest children’s poets at the moment are not named.
Suppose that you wish to write, as I recently did, that Samuel Beckett admired the following motion-picture clowns:
Laurel and Hardy
Chaplin
Keaton.
How would you group them with commas instead of with numbers? Laurel and Hardy are a pair, so if you (as an anti-commatist) end the list with them, you will have a list of four people with one comma, say: “Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.” This tends to group the last three together; it also raises the question why there is a comma at all after “Chaplin” instead of “and.” If you begin the list with them—“Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton”—you seem to have two pairs, not three items. And if you put them in the middle—“Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Keaton”—you get the same problem we find in the first option. Putting a comma before the final “and” obviates all these troubles.
The habit of omitting the comma, I admit, sometimes earns its right to exist through hilarity. To make the point that its gyms are “judgment free zones,” Planet Fitness, Inc., places a large sign in the front of its exercise room that defines a “lunk” as “one who grunts, drops weights and judges.” I suppose it is a judgment-free zone because some lunk dropped all the judges from a considerable height. PF, Inc., also drops hyphens, unless it believes that it offers us free zones for judgments.
Here is something amusing from a higher source, a statement by Pope Francis on May 16, 2013, welcoming several new ambassadors: “I am pleased to receive you for the presentation of the Letters accrediting you as Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Holy See on the part of your respective countries: Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and Botswana.” “Antigua and Barbuda” is the name of one country, but Luxembourg and Botswana are not parts of the same grand duchy.
On December 10, 2013, for a last example, Sky News announced these top stories: “World leaders at Mandela tribute, Obama-Castro handshake and same-sex marriage date set . . . .”
The arguments I have been making apply, of course, to series of terms united by “or.”
You may order a piece of cake, a plate of cheese and crackers,
or a slice of pie.
It is rare to encounter a defense of the leave-out-the-comma policy, probably because once a writer or editor stops to think about it the correct policy reveals itself as correct. Many writers and editors just leave it out, though they probably have no considered opinion. What positive reasons might be offered for getting rid of the comma? To save ink? Be serious. To simplify? But what could be simpler than a comma? To save space? This might be a minor motive in a newspaper, but hardly worth sacrificing clarity for; commas are tiny. Even if it did save appreciable space to omit the comma, that motive has nothing to do with the arguments about clarity, grammar, or style: it is imposition from outside them, and it exacts a cost. To remove redundancies? But we have shown that the commas are not redundant, and even if they were, what is wrong with a certain amount of redundancy? Information theory has shown that a good writing system contains redundancies. About the only reason one can defend is that it often matters little if the comma is left out. But that is a very weak reason, because it often matters very much indeed, it is never wrong to put the comma in, and it is unwise to have a variable policy—a policy that requires a comma only when an ambiguity would result from omitting it. (Note the momentary confusion that would result if the comma after “in” in the preceding sentence were left out.) A variable policy itself breeds ambiguities.
Some opponents of the serial comma point out that some series of items are ambiguous and their ambiguities cannot be resolved by inserting the comma. For example:
They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid and a cook.
Here, under the regime I have been advocating, Betty is a maid and a cook, but the writer may be trying to say that there was a maid and a cook besides Betty. Insert a comma, however, and it gets worse:
They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook.
This could mean either that Betty is a maid (but not a cook) or that she is not a maid (or a cook); inserting the comma does not clear up the problem.
But under the leave-the-comma-out regime we are no closer to a solution: the sentence is still readable in two conflicting ways; one of the ways is different from one of the ways under the put-the-comma-in regime.
This series is inherently ambiguous and needs more than a comma to rescue it. It is not ammunition against the comma, or for it.
The only other reason—well, motive—I can think of for omitting the comma is that it is sometimes called “the Oxford comma” or “the Harvard comma.” “Oxford” and “Harvard” here are evidently just terms of abuse by reverse snobs. According to the King James Bible, Jesus used that comma, though he was a student at neither Oxford nor Harvard.
Above all, editors should not remove this comma from a writer’s manuscript. A writer who always uses the comma will have a slightly different ear, a slightly different feeling for sentence structure and logical ordering, from one who does not, and to “correct” the commas will inflict subtle but widespread damage on his or her prose.
Authorities
W. Fowler, in Modern English Usage (first edition 1926), anathematizes what he calls “bastard enumeration”: the omission of the final comma. He gives many examples.
The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White (1972 edition): “In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.” Example: “He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents.”
Hodges’ Harbrace Handbook, 13th ed. (1998), finds the omission of the comma “acceptable . . . when there is no danger of misreading” (142). The trouble with this rule, however, is that it invites a variable or optional policy, which is a bad idea. The Little, Brown Handbook below explicitly warns against inconsistent usage.
The Everyday Writer, by Lunsford and Connors (1999): “You may often see a series with no comma after the next-to-last item, particularly in newspaper writing. Omitting the comma can cause confusion, however, and you will never be wrong if you include it.”
The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers, 2nd ed., by Anson and Schwegler (2000): “Placing a comma before the and that introduces the last item in a series helps avoid confusion.”
The Bedford Handbook, 6th ed., by Hacker (2002): “When three or more items are presented in a series, those items should be separated from one another by commas. . . . Although some writers view the comma between the last two items as optional, most experts advise using the comma because its omission can result in ambiguity or misreading.”
The Little, Brown Handbook, 10th ed. (2007): “Use commas between words, phrases, or clauses forming a series” [as in this very sentence]; “the final comma is never wrong, and it always helps the reader see the last two items as separate.”
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed., by Gibaldi (2009): “Use commas to separate words, phrases, and clauses in a series” [as in this sentence as well]. Three examples follow. (It has another ambiguity, however, as it is not clear from the structure if “in a series” applies to all three items.)
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014): “I say that unless a house style forbids it, you should use the serial comma.” Pinker is relaxed about many traditional rules, but he sticks with this one. He gives some good examples of “garden paths”—ambiguities that send readers down the wrong syntactic road—that omission of the comma can create, such as “He enjoyed his farm, conversations with his wife and his horse.”