Do you hate Oxford commas?
Do you also hate Facebook forwards that prove nothing more than the fact that if you selectively arrange the elements in a sentence no one would ever say, you can make something sound confusing?
The original (no idea who created it, or I’d give credit):
My return shot:
There are plenty of examples of sentences that are difficult (and some that impossible) to parse when the Oxford comma is dropped, causing readers to reread the sentence trying to make sense out of it, and at the least that is just bad writing.
The last picture is only accurate if you remove the comma after the word stripper. You might be right that there are examples where the Oxfod comma fails, but this isn’t one of them.
neal replied:
February 28th, 2012 at 10:30 am
No, because “JFK” is a nonrestrictive appositive, and therefore must be set off by commas. If that comma were unnecessary, then the initial pro-Oxford comma example would be incorrect as well. Both situations are dependent on the ambiguity created by placing an appositive within a series.