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As a side not, thanks to the article, I now know I use Oxford/serial commas.
by raintrees 14y ago
As a side not, thanks to the article, I now know I use Oxford/serial commas.
- sgentle 14y agoApparently quite common among hackers. I remember reading a section about it in ESR's Jargon File ages back that had a great explanation: Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this: Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”. Standard usage would make this Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.” but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines! http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html
- lmm 14y agoUm, that quoting style is indeed common among hackers, but it has nothing to do with the Oxford comma.
- sgentle 14y agoHa! Oops, my mistake. For some reason when I hear "Oxford comma" I always think comma-inside-the-quote rather than comma-before-the-and. I wonder if there's an equivalent hacker preference and explanation for the comma. Most of the people I know prefer it. Maybe we're all just doing list.join(", ") in our heads, or perhaps it's an instinctive mistrust for ambiguous grammar.
- mrj 14y agoThe phrase you're looking for appears to be "logical punctuation." http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_rise_of_logical_punctuation.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the...
- bpatrianakos 14y agoI've used the Oxford comma since high school when my favorite English teacher introduced me to them. At the time I didn't know they had a name. I found out they were called Oxford commas about five days ago when watching an episode of Boss on Starz. Since looking it up then I suddenly come across the term a lot now which is weird because I had never heard that term before.
- _pius 14y agoSince looking it up then I suddenly come across the term a lot now which is weird because I had never heard that term before. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. :)
- TallboyOne 14y agoI always find this weird because it feels so real that I have NEVER heard of them before, even subconsciously, and then they appear...
- raintrees 14y agoIsn't this what helps feed the idea of attention having an affect on the object of intent?
- autophil 14y agoI call it the 'red Honda effect'. If you are waiting for a ride, and the driver of the car has a red Honda, you start to notice a lot of red Hondas.