A Good Negative Example of Why You Need the Oxford Comma

The Oxford comma is putting a comma before the last item (before the conjunction if the list has one) in a list of three or more. For example: one, two, and three. A lot of styles tell you not to put in that last comma. The excuse is that it saves space. (Humbug!) the problem is that without that comma you might be misunderstood sometimes. Here’s an example where you shouldn’t use that comma, because it’s not a list of three or more things even though at first glance that’s what it looks like. First panel:

The first item (Mom,) is direct address, so the other two words (Dad and Michael) don’t make a list of three, so no comma.

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I mentioned this back in early July. Do you remember what it’s called when you reverse the initial letters in a pair of words?

The earlier post was July 6, 2023, and another on Dec 30, 2019 in case you’re interested.

A millenium is a group of 1000 consecutive years. Millenia is more than one of those 1000-year groups. First panel, he gets it wrong.

Or another hobby horse of mine. You see the goof, right?

• “Nauseous” means “causing nausea.”
• You want “nauseated” for “feeling nausea.”

Or maybe disagreement. In English we have sepaate verb forms for connection with singular or plural nouns. Plural verb goes with plural nouns, singular with singular. First panel:

The verb is “comes,” which is the singular form. but we have two girls, clearly a plural. Wrong verb. I kind of apologize to our non-English-speaking friends that we use -s for the singular third person verb form and -s for the plurals of nouns.