3 ms·

Why do you have that first comma. "I'd like to thank my mother Ayn Rand, and God" is clearer.

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• in_cahoots 10y ago
  Yes, but how do you handle the case where your mother is not Ayn Rand and you want to thank three individuals?
  • mrob 10y ago
    "I'd like to thank my mother, to thank Ayn Rand, and to thank God."
    • desdiv 10y ago
      Following the conventions of programming languages with mandatory bounds checking (and thus have to keep track of the array size at all times): "I'd like to thank three people: my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."
• pfooti 10y ago
  The first comma is more-or-less required. It either means, "my mother, who is ayn rand", or it is a serial comma to indicate three people, the speaker's mother, ayn rand and god. There is no construction where there's no comma between 'mother' and 'ayn' AFAIK, it's just either appositive or serial. One could reconstruct the sentence: I would like to thank my mother (who is ayn rand), and god. I would like to thank god and my mother, ayn rand. The problem isn't that other, less-ambiguous constructions exist, it is that the construction as written is ambiguous but grammatically correct. It's an operator overloading issue.
• swammeyjoe 10y ago
  That's not correct, as both "mother" and "Ayn Rand" are items in a list and need to be separated by a comma.