Oxford comma gives us pause

The horrible piece of punctuation has survived a pedant war.
WITH all due respect to the ancient university, just because you put the word ''Oxford'' in front of something, it doesn't make it immune from criticism.
An Oxford Blue is pretty impressive. Oxford shoes look nice and smart; but the Oxford comma? What a horrible thing. Thank God that the university's branding people decided to remove it from their style book. Sadly, after a storm of pedantry on Twitter, Oxford University Press has insisted that it is retaining the comma, as it has for a century.
What was all the fuss about? The Oxford - or serial - comma is the one inserted just before the ''and'' or ''or'' in the last item of a list of three or more items. If Winston Churchill had used an Oxford comma, he would have written, ''I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'' Without the Oxford comma, he would have offered just ''blood, toil, tears and sweat''.

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These are choppy grammatical waters. Usually, the answer is to follow the grammatical rule that removes confusion. In Lynne Truss's best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves, she illustrates correct comma use with reference to a violent panda, as defined in a badly punctuated wildlife book.
After lunch, the panda fires a gun at fellow customers in a cafe. To justify his actions to the waiter, the panda points at the shoddy manual, where he is defined as a mammal that ''eats, shoots and leaves''.
On the whole, no such distinction is created by the Oxford comma. We understand what Churchill is offering, whether he uses the Oxford comma or not. There are, admittedly, times when an Oxford comma makes better sense. ''I'd like to thank my parents, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe'' is less confusing than ''I'd like to thank my parents, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.''
But then again, the Oxford comma can be more confusing, too. ''I'd like to thank my father, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe'' causes more trouble than ''I'd like to thank my father, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.''
So, honours even on the making-sense front. But, on the grounds of simplicity and beauty, the Oxford comma loses out. Its absence makes a sentence less cluttered and more pleasing to the eye.
The truth is, the Oxford comma - fiddly, correct but followed only by a clever minority - smacks of smug pedantry. As HW Fowler said in Modern English Usage, ''Pride of knowledge is a very unamiable characteristic, and the display of it should be sedulously avoided.''
Fowler, writing in 1926, chose the pernickety use of ''journal'' as an example of this sort of annoying pedantry. Coming from the Old French ''jurnal'', meaning ''daily'', ''journal'' should only be used of daily papers, according to 1920s pedants. Not even the most pompous of linguistic fogeys would insist on that these days.
Kingsley Amis had a ruder word for this sort of pedant (one the Telegraph's style book precludes me from using), who (or whom) he called ''prissy, fussy, priggish, prim''.
The Oxford comma is entering that zombie half-life where all dying grammatical rules survive for a while - appreciated only by the prissy and the fussy. It's better to kill off the poor, awkward thing, rather than let it linger on, unhappily, between the covers of books published by Oxford University Press.
Harry Mount is an author and former leader writer for the Telegraph.


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