And now, for something different: The Oxford comma

Saw this in today’s NYT and it’s just too good not to share:

www.nytimes.com/…

The case began in 2014, when three truck drivers sued the dairy for what they said was four years’ worth of overtime pay they had been denied. Maine law requires time-and-a-half pay for each hour worked after 40 hours, but it carved out exemptions for:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

…

What followed the last comma in the first sentence was the crux of the matter: “packing for shipment or distribution of.”

…

Had there been a comma after “shipment,” the meaning would have been clear. David G. Webbert, a lawyer who represented the drivers, stated it plainly in an interview in March: “That comma would have sunk our ship.”

…

Here’s how it reads now:

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of:

(1) Agricultural produce;

(2) Meat and fish products; and

(3) Perishable foods.

So now we get to replace Oxford comma pedantry with semicolon pedantry.

LOL! Call me a pedant, NYT, but I always prefer the serial comma (aka Oxford comma b/c, as the NYT puts it, Oxford University Press uses it).

And here we see exactly why punctuation matters: clarity in legal documents would have prevented the lawsuit entirely or, as Webbert said, the drivers would have lost.

In fact, the Times could use a few more commas, very frequently: I often find myself re-reading a sentence that could have been clear with the use of one; or mentally inserting it.