William Gibson, you're so cool.

"They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat."

I think I am going to enjoy Count Zero even more than Neuromancer.

Apparently, a few select people DO care about the Oxford comma.

The results of our study are in. We have collected a whole slew of statistics from you, the community at large, regarding your thoughts on the Oxford comma. To make things lively and graphical, I have decided to reveal the data in the form of pie charts in addition to percentage statistics.

Let us recall the original question. Oxford comma: Yay or nay? Overall, 73% of our audience of over 200 voters responded yay, and 27% responded nay. Graphically:


Honestly, this roughly lined up with similar polls we had seen online. To make things interesting, we decided to also examine demographic statistics such as gender and college major/area of study. I should note that many of the people I polled were working professionals who worked in fields entirely unrelated to their college major. I did not poll anyone who did not have at least some college experience. This was not on purpose - I just polled whoever was convenient, and I happen to work at a university. The statistics with regards to gender were fairly boring - for both males and females, the graph above was essentially replicated. The statistics with regard to area of study were a bit more interesting. Before proceeding, I should further note that I also "polled" some celebrities, politicians, and academics by checking out their webpages to add some fun and variety to this poll. Now, without further ado, here are the charts and statistics.

Science and Technology

Yay: 84%, Nay: 16%

Pure Mathematics

Yay: 71%, Nay: 29%

Law and Policy

Yay: 100%, Nay: 0%

Business

Yay: 92%, Nay: 8%

Liberal Arts

Yay: 63%, Nay: 37%

Education

Yay: 100%, Nay: 0%

Journalism

Yay: 5%, Nay: 95%

A few remarks to finish off this post:

• My fiancee Sarah and I predicted a great number of these statistics ahead of time. One set of statistics we did not predict, however, was the one associated with liberal arts. We honestly figured a lot more people trained in the liberal arts would be against the Oxford comma as was the case for journalists. However, I suppose the result is not entirely unexpected as the Chicago Manual of Style, which advocates the Oxford comma, is the grammar bible of choice for many liberal artists.
  
• I polled a lot of people with a background in law. They all, to a t, replied yay. I later learned the Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers insists that lawyers use the Oxford comma. As an aside, I should note the improper use (or absence) of a comma can lead to a world of hurt in the courtroom, as illustrated by this court case.
  
• Facebook does not use the Oxford comma. Neither does any major news publication or magazine.
  
• We originally decided to separate pure mathematics from science/technology early into our poll. A lot of students I knew studying pure mathematics were against the Oxford comma, illustrating a clear break in trend from the other sciences. However, I then began to start examining the writing habits of prominent mathematicians in the field and found a different set of preferences. And for the record, Terry Tao seems to prefer the Oxford comma.
  
• I use the Oxford comma. Sarah often does not. We somehow manage.
  
• I only included American citizens in this poll. If I was to include visiting Europeans I know, for example, the outcome of the poll would have been a bit different. Notably, my Italian collaborators rarely use the Oxford comma (even in their journal publications written in English) as it is not used in their native language.
  

Attack of the Grammarians

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.