Tuesday, May 12, 2015

A Not So Commaical Situation


Today I would like to discuss an extremely serious topic; one that penetrates our lives and goes by unnoticed on a daily if not hourly basis. I'm sure a few of you already know what I am referring to. I apologize if you were expecting a funny or even comical blog, but I am going to have to be serious right now as I deal with this extremely imperative topic: the serial comma.
Some of you may know the serial comma as the Oxford comma. To those of you who have never heard of this crucial piece of punctuation, I will attempt to explain the situation.
The serial comma is a comma used before the "and" in a list of topics. For a few years now, there has been a growing debate on whether or not this comma is useful. As the debate continues, more and more people are switching to the "not useful" side and leaving the serial comma behind in the dust.
In order to shed some light on the reality of the issue, I traveled to a community of abandoned serial commas to get their opinion on the matter.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," one serial comma said to me gravely. "I have a family to support, bills to pay, and a day to fill. The positions for serial commas have decreased so massively that I'm not even certain that a college education will be enough to help my children obtain positions in the English language."
"All we can do is hope," the leader of Working to Hinder Ambiguous Texts (WHAT) informed me. "Hope that the world won't turn their back on us, that someone somewhere will hear our cries, and that the serial commas will find their places in the sentence structure once more."
Of course, not everyone in the community agrees that they are necessary anymore. I met up with the leader of the Working to Hinder Youth (WHY) group - which deals with destroying punctuation to create more ambiguity in the written language - to obtain their point of view.
"The way I see it the more people are confused by the written language the better," the spokes person of WHY explained, impatient to return to their daily routine of deleting serial commas from Wikipedia articles. "If people couldnt understand written language they might look up from those texting devices every once in a while Plus who wants to put in the effort to type one extra comma Were better off without them"
As the unemployment rate increases among serial commas, their community weakens. During my visit, I saw countless commas lying naked and hungry on the streets. Those who did have the resources needed to take care of their families were working unbelievable hours to obtain their income and had none to spare for their suffering brethren.
I encourage you readers to look into this imperative issue yourselves, take your own notes, and see the reality of the matter. A world without serial commas will not make sense, wills will become ambiguous, and the world will cease to exist as we know it. DO NOT LET THIS ISSUE PASS BY UNNOTICED! We all need to be doing everything we can to get to the bottom of the this issue, bring back the serial comma from poverty, and give it a well deserved place in the human language.

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