Life, Love and the Serial Comma

I'll bet you'd never imagine grown people coming to blows over a comma.

I belong to a writing group ( FreelanceWritersAndEditors@yahoogroups.com ) where writers of all stripes come to talk about the publishing trade. We've got people in there who are still afraid to show their poetry to anyone to some big guns out of The City.

And some of those Big City guys are part of the group.

This week some editors nearly shaved stray cats over the use of a serial comma.

That's something like:

Jack saw perverts, thugs and winos during his adventure.

This is a good example of newspaper writing. It has its roots from when every space counted because they set type by hand and put it on a printing plate. And every second. Even a comma was a big deal when time was not user friendly.

(And then too, they were lazy. It may seem like a little thing on paper, but when you are setting type Union Pressmen need to push out those plates because they were due coffee breaks just around deadline. When you are sniffing ink fumes all day you get pretty hyper about these things.)

Book-length projects were another matter. Time was a luxury when Man moved from chipping deathless prose in stone to tree bark. Man wasn't pressed for deadlines. That space didn't matter.

And so that sentence would read:

Jack saw perverts, thugs, and winos during his adventure.

You'd almost think a bunch of people got together and twiddled forever on abstract minutia. Like they didn't have anything else to do for decades. They have an entire course at Harvard over punctuation like this. Really. Makes you wonder a lot about those Great Minds with Advanced Degrees think about when they are having sex.

My clients have driven me batshit at times. They put commas in all kinds of places.

Check your skirts ladies.

I've given up for the most part. I don't sweat the commas. I try to pay attention to the stories. I'm not going to step out in the alley over this crap. Let the guys with the pointy heads figure it out.

Watch, a bunch of anal retentive line editors are going to write now. Hope they know where they can put the commas.

I'd love to hear back on this on this folks. Let's dance.