Inspired by Vampire Weekend, my fiancee and I have decided to take a poll. The question: what are your thoughts on the Oxford comma: yay, nay, or who honestly cares? Of course, it is almost impossible for me to not introduce bias into the poll with a list composing of three or more answers (call the neutrality police, he already used the comma!). Nevertheless, we have gotten a fair amount of interesting answers so far, and we are hoping to wrap up the poll soon. I am hoping to do an analysis of the data based on area of study/career, age, and gender. Stay tuned for the results!
On the topic of grammar, I thought of a fun grammatical conundrum while discussing the issue of the Oxford comma with a few of my fellow graduate students. Consider the following all-around terrible sentence:
My favorite three meals are bacon, eggs(,) and cheese, spaghetti, meatballs(,) and marinara, and steak and potatoes.
Regardless of whether one uses the Oxford comma or not, it is a downright terrible sentence. Of course, we all know the solution (okay, maybe its not entirely obvious or even universally supported): use the all-powerful and little-understood semi-colon. Then we have:
My favorite three meals are bacon, eggs(,) and cheese; spaghetti, meatballs(,) and marinara; and steak and potatoes.
Mathematically speaking, we have a list of sets. To separate the individual sets, we use a semi-colon. Now, what if we have a list of sets of sets? Consider the following awful, awful situation:
We decided to break the nine kids into one of three possible combinations of groups of three:
Andrew, Brian(,) and Freddy
Sam, Jim(,) and Sue
Steven, John(,) and Julia
Andrew(,) Freddy, and Sam
Jim, Sue(,) and Steven
Brian, John(,) and Julia
Andrew, Sam(,) and Steven
Brian, Jim(,) and John
Freddy, Sue(,) and Julia
How would we enumerate this list of lists into one sentence? Now, I know what you are thinking. Why the hell would we want to do that? That is terrible style! However, let's just consider it as a case that is allowable in the English language. In this sense, I am seeking universal consistency. Do we need a new symbol to be able to separate items which are lists of lists? Shall we return to Latin?
And what if we had a list of sets of sets of sets? Dear God, what have I done?
And so the mathematician continues to consider the worst case which never appears in practice. *Sigh*. If you were at all interested by this, check out the huge field of linguistics. And read up on Noam Chomsky. Well, his work on grammar anyway.
Latin originally lacked punctuation, so that's probably not the answer you're seeking...although they had two types of "and"--et and the enclitic -que. Now the que would be great for the steak and potatoes (or should I say steak potatoesque) and the et could fill the void of the final connector of a set...
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that Latin originally lack punctuation considering that many of their words lead to our current punctuation marks (e.g., Qo -> ?). I think it would be fun to use other words to derive even more punctuation marks. That being said, I think the combined use of et and -que could be lots of fun.
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