Does anyone even learn about comma splices anymore?
Misuse of the serial comma doesn’t exactly get my Irish up, but never you fear, John Rosenberg is on the case: O.K., I’m sure some of you are asking, what does the serial comma have to do with discrimination? I could be cute and say it reflects discriminating taste, but I won’t. I could say that the anarchy of the NYT’s punctuation reveals what happens when “rules” are so flexible they aren’t rules at all, or if they are they are too confusing to apply consistently, and that, though a bit overblown, would be getting closer to what one’s attitude toward the serial comma reveals about other (some would say more important) issues. Many, perhaps most, critics of rules (or “strict rules,” if you prefer) misunderstand them. They see them as the command of Orthodoxy, or at least Authority, and hence believe that freedom demands defiance. They see them as Absolutes, and hence out of time and place in our modern (or, worse, postmodern) pragmatic, relativistic culture. What these critics of rule
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