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What petty hill will you die on? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by thrawn21@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

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For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.

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[–] VoxAdActa@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.

You can't. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.

I think we both agree that the comma being optional is the mother of ten thousand confusions, we just disagree on what should be done about that.

If the Oxford comma was required, the sentence naming the strippers as JFK and Stalin no longer has any ambiguity whatsoever; it can only mean one thing.

If the Oxford comma was banned, the sentence naming the strippers would have to be rearranged entirely to avoid ambiguity. Instead of being able to clarify the relationship with a single keypress or tiny jot, we have to edit the entire sentence (the simplest way I can think of would be to say "JFK and Stalin are the strippers I invited.")

As for the bit about speech, you've lost me. I've never had a conversation with another native English speaker (and I've lived in 10 different US states, from Texas to Connecticut) where a list of three or more things was spoken without a pause before the "and". Maybe it's different in other English-speaking countries? I also used to have regular conversations with an Australian, and I never noticed any confusion, but that was some 20ish years ago now, so my memory might not be reliable.