Here's something that I've been trying to figure out. Are there some kind of special guidelines for putting a comma before 'and' in a list? It seems sometimes it's "bread, lettuce, and cheese" and other times it's "bread, lettuce and cheese. Isn't the later saying that lettuce and cheese are some kind of combo that isn't separated like 'peanut butter and jelly' in "bread, peanut butter and jelly, and another piece of bread"?

I don't think so. For me, the commas in the list replace 'and'. (It's grammatically correct to say 'bread and lettuce and cheese'; it just sounds a little childish.) The last comma in "bread, lettuce, and cheese" would therefore be redundant - although I think some style-gurus say it's OK.

To make it clear you were talking about a combo, you could use 'with': 'bread, with lettuce and cheese'. Or maybe even hyphens: 'bread, with lettuce-and-cheese'.

Anyway, to me 'A, B and C' looks like a list of three distinct things, and 'A, B, and C' looks like there's one comma too many.

Excellent, thanks. That helps. Doesn't sound too complicated. I think I do see more writers writing your way than the other way.

Was there a point in the earlier English language when people used 'and' after each word in a list? Was taking out the first 'and' like a simplification of the language as it evolved?

This question on the use of "and" and commas has appeared somewhere else. Could have been Jeeves. There, I brought up the case of a will which, more or less, read "I leave my estate to my children X, Y and Z. X took it to court saying that "Y and Z" meant they got half and X got the other half, and won. Could be an urban legend; it's been so long since I read the story I can't supply a source.

Newnickname, it's more than just ok. Putting a comma before the "and" is the form preferred by style gurus.

And excerpt from my grammar bible, Strunk and White:

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

Thus write,

red, white, and blue
honest, energetic, but headstrong
He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents.

This is also the usage of the Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press.

In the names of business firms the last comma is omitted, as

Brown, Shipley and Company

The abbreviation etc., even if only a single term comes before it, is always preceded by a comma.

If I remember correctly, the trend of dropping the comma is creditted to newspapers saving space, and this is where most style guides say it should remain.

I agree with Strunk and White. In fact, in my opinion, every high schooler should have a Strunk and White. The little book is a better grammar textbook than most of the textbooks I have seen, and a great deal cheaper.

Ah. Maybe it's British-English vs. US-English yet again.

"We use commas to separate items in a list. In British English, a comma is not usually used with and between the last two items unless these are long." Practical English Usage Michael Swan (OUP)

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:
Ah. Maybe it's British-English vs. US-English yet again.

"We use commas to separate items in a list. In British English, a comma is not usually used with and between the last two items unless these are long." Practical English Usage Michael Swan (OUP)

Yes. I would not write " Red,white,and blue". That's because the comma is being used to indicate a pause.We do not write " The statement was in black,and white" or "He was beaten black,and blue" or " It was raining cats, and dogs " or " Boys, and girls come out to play " unless we mean there to be a pause, so that the last would be said as " Boys...and girls come out to play". (The example given above of 'honest, energetic, but headstrong' should have a comma after 'energetic' because the speaker would, indeed, pause there for emphasis.It is a pause to draw attention to the next adjective. He or she would say "honest, energetic...but headstrong" )

We use commas to show or suggest where a speaker should take a breath or make a pause and , by extension, we treat a reader as speaking to himself . The punctuation helps with the phrasing .The comma between 'red' and 'white' indicates a pause necessary to show that we have two separate colours here, red and white, and not one thing called 'redwhite' or 'red-white': we have a list. The comma after 'white' is intrusive because it lengthens the gap between 'white' and 'and' , so making it longer than the gap between 'and' and 'blue'.Reading it aloud whilst following the punctuation , I would find myself saying it with about twice the length of pause between 'white' and 'blue' as that between ''red' and 'white'. So it would be: " Red [pause] white [pause][ pause] and [pause] blue " That is not what the writer, I suppose, intends.

You lost me there, Fred. If the comma indicates a pause, why two pauses before "and" for only one comma and one pause after for none? As I would speak it the commas make sense:

Red [pause] white [pause] and blue.

Leaving out the second pause sounds odd to me, and, similar to the way not having the comma makes it look to Jusork, not having the pause makes it sound to me like white and blue are somehow part of a group distinct from red.

Having the comma, and with it the pause, somehow included in the "and" also doesn't make sense to me. If it said merely, "red and white," a pause would sound unnatural to me.

I should note that leaving out the comma is quite common in American English, despite what the style gurus say, and that it seems to be becoming more common. Evolution of language or spread of poor grammar?

Ahh! Got an good discussion going. The American-version explaination doesn't sound too complicated either.

Thanks everyone, especially Methos for clarifying.

The New Yorker magazine almost single-handedly fought the good fight to avoid commas unless they were logically necessary. It was under its influence that the comma preceding 'and' began to be omitted.

I see that Margaret Shertzer, in her book The Elements of Grammar, makes the use of the redundant comma optional.

I cannot see that it is essential to meaning. The comma in a list clues the reader to pause between items. But the ultimate word is demarked by the word 'and'.

In Jusork's example above,
"... bread, lettuce and cheese. Isn't the later saying that lettuce and cheese are some kind of combo that isn't separated like 'peanut butter and jelly' in 'bread, peanut butter and jelly, and another piece of bread'?

I cannot see the need for the redundant comma.

We could demark the list items with commas alone:

"Bring me food, wine, a pine log."

Or with conjunctions alone:

"Bring me food and wine and a pine log."

But this, some would say, is incorrect. We should say:

"Bring me food and wine, and a pine log."

So here the comma is a clue that the following word completes the list. But so is the period at the end of the sentence.

So it's a convention that we use 'and' not so much as a conjunction, but as an additional clue that the list is complete.

The options are: "bread, lettuce and cheese" and "bread, lettuce, and cheese."

In the middle of a list, there is no confusion:

"... bread, walnuts, lettuce and cheese, prunes and goat's milk."

At the end of a list, there is no confusion either: "... bread, walnuts, prunes, goat's milk and lettuce and cheese."

The brain seems to demand a pause between items in a list. Sometimes we use a line break:

I need
- a loaf of bread
- a jug of wine
- air
- water.

In the list above, I omitted and after air. But only a cretin would think I wanted some weird item, air water. One demarkation is necessary and sufficient.

So IMO the use of ", and " is a convention.

The example of the disgruntled heirs (above) must have involved a holographic will. Lawyers use redundancy deliberately to avoid litigation. Wills use expressions like:

"I leave my estate to be divided among my legitimate children now living, named x1x2x3, y1y2y3, and z1z2z3, and my legitimate child or children yet unborn, if any, who shall be living at the time of my death, in equal shares..."

I'm kidding here, but I think a legalistic possibility is hardly reason to lumber the rest of us with unwanted and unneeded commas for all eternity.

As an inveterate user of all sorts of illogical and redundant punctuation, I personally am tolerant of either commas after the final 'and' in a list or not. What I do find annoying, however, is that there seems to be a growing omission of the space after the comma in a typed document; I notice that Fred and some others write a list as bread,cheese,baloney, whereas I and Babs, for one would write bread, cheese, baloney. If that is a British or simply 'modern improvement', I welcome clarification.

Yeah, Frank, I do write baloney sometimes. Especially when I don't catch a spelling mistake until it's too late to edit it.

quote:

demark, demarked, demarcation

I hate that.

quote:

Originally posted by methos:
You lost me there, Fred. If the comma indicates a pause, why two pauses before "and" for only one comma and one pause after for none? As I would speak it the commas make sense:

Red [pause] white [pause] and blue?

Because the comma between 'red' and 'white' marks a pause which helps us to understand we have a list. (Or, put another way, it serves as an unspoken 'and'). So does the word 'and' show a link between the last two adjectives. So I would read the sentence portentously or solemnly as " Red [pause] white [pause] and [pause] blue " or normally as " Red [pause] white and blue ". Why make the pause on one side of the 'and' longer than that on the other? That is the effect of the last comma. It adds a pause to one side : "white [comma=pause] and blue" or " white [comma=pause] [pause] and [pause] blue ". Either write "white,and,blue" or " white and blue" but not one of each version

Lynne Truss, in Eats Shoots and Leaves tells of how there was continual petty war over punctuation at The New Yorker. Ross, the editor, was fond of the comma as pause. A correspondent wrote to Thurber asking why there was a comma in this text: " After dinner , the men went to the living room." Thurber wrote back: " That particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. "

quote:

whereas I and Babs, for one would write bread, cheese, baloney.

Horrors!. I meant to say: whereas I, and Babs for one, would write bread, cheese, yule logs, etc. Babs would say bologna, or something equally refined.

This thread is making me hungry...time for lunch!

quote:

Originally posted by FredPuli:
Why make the pause on one side of the 'and' longer than that on the other?

Perhaps it's a quirk of British* cadence I hadn't noticed, but it seems to me that people over here do pause before the and (although "red, white, and blue" is a poor example to observe this in because many Americans tend to run the whole phrase together, not even pausing at the first comma). I think Jusork and I have explained why already.

*Or, of course, American cadence depending on your perspective.

I remember that Thurber witticism from Truss's book.

But what's this notion that commas correspond to pauses in speech cadence? Written language has its own (more or less) formal rules of syntax, and I wonder if the "pause test" for commas is simply misleading.

As for writing lists of three or more items:

As a school child I was taught that either was correct (comma or not after penultimate list item) but the predominant American preference, and my own as well, seems to be: red, white, and blue, i.e., with the final comma.

Syntactically I look at it this way: The comma after each item signals the end of the item (in computer lingo, a terminator). The word and additionally signals the start of the final item in the list.

This covers babthrower's "lettuce and cheese" scenario above. Thus Our sandwiches include roast beef, turkey, peanut butter and jelly, and grilled cheese. Still with the food?! Would anyone deny the necessity of the comma after jelly?

As for frankvan's point about spaces after commas: Omitting them turns out to be computer- (as well as reader-) un-friendly. It will likely befoul spell-checkers and wreak havoc with automatic word-wrapping in narrow windows. Text needs to breathe a little white space.