This description, published in The Times, of a documentary by Peter Ustinov:
… highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
An Argument for the Oxford Comma
I, for one, have always advocated the use of the serial (Oxford) comma, Vampire Weekend notwithstanding. (via)
Here’s a finer point of grammar that I probably learned years ago. On page 763 of Infinite Jest, Mario is talking to his mother:
Mario: “How can you tell if somebody’s sad?”
Avril: “You mean whether someone’s sad.”
Not being able to recall the distinction between “if” and “whether”, I asked the question of the Infinite Summer forum and got this response from user isabella:
From Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which DFW discussed at length in “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage”):
It’s a good practice to distinguish between these words. Use if for a conditional idea, whether for an alternative or possibility. Thus, Let me know if you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you only if you’re coming. But Let me know whether you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you about your plans one way or the other.
Copyeditors (I am one) generally try to maintain the distinction.
Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar
Great look at the lolcat phenomenon.
A few things about printed English have been bothering me lately:
A big pet peeve of mine is when people leave out the last comma in a list. For example: last night I ate dinner, watched tv and played video games. The names of most law firms are like this. I temp’ed at this one: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, L.L.P. The problem is that the commas denote seperation. Leaving one out implies grouping. Say, for instance, I was known to be into orgies and wanted to list my exploits for the weekend: Tina, Cindy, Mary and Debbie. Are “Mary and Debbie” one exploit or two seperate encounters? There isn’t a good way to write a list if one of the list items has a comma in it. Example: when I get a lot of money, I’d like to buy a fast car, Sony, Inc., and a pony. Sony, Inc. is obviously one item in the list, but since the comma plays two roles it just don’t look very tidy. I don’t know who to complain to about this to have it fixed. Is there a government entity in charge of punctuation that could set rules and impose fines?
Update: Ah, it seems that Jon is right, and I should have been on top of that. From my very quick research, it looks like AP Style suggests omitting the last comma while Chicago Style leaves it in, but it’s always up to the style-guide of a publication to decide which to use. Still, I think omitting the final comma is confusing, because lists can contain compound items (as per my orgy example). To say, “this weekend, my sexual encounters were with: Tina, Cindy, Mary and Debbie” and “this weekend, my sexual encounters were with: “Tina, Mary and Debbie, and Cindy” both mean the same thing in my eyes. That is, that this weekend I had a one-on-one sexual experiences with both Tina and Cindy and had a threesome with Mary and Debbie. If you omit the last comma, that distinction is lost. Each comma should denote a new item in the list. If commas aren’t present, grouping should be assumed. So, “Tina, Cindy, Mary, and Debbie” means four seperate sessions, while “Tina, Cindy, Mary and Debbie” means three sessions, one of which was a threesome.