Joy is in the ears that hear

musingsofabibliophile:

lesserjoke:

Eh. I tend to use the Oxford comma myself, but there’s a possibility for ambiguity either way. Consider:

1. We invited the stripper, JFK and Stalin.
2. We invited the stripper, JFK, and Stalin.

Sentence 1, without an Oxford comma, is clearly about three individuals. Sentence 2, which uses an Oxford comma, is ambiguous between that reading and one in which JFK is a stripper.

Basically: by all means use whichever convention you like, but don’t act like it removes ambiguity from your writing. It merely shifts that ambiguity to different sentences.

 I will agree there is still ambiguity, but think the pluralization of strippers makes it less ambiguous than your version. There is also the order in which they are placed; if “the strippers” had been the last noun in the sentence, there would be no ambiguity at all. That and JFK and Stalin as strippers is just hilarious.

1)      We invited JFK, Stalin, and the strippers.

2)      We invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers.

Clearly at least four people in each sentence. Unless of course you want to argue that Stalin and the strippers are one group in themselves.

I also feel much of the ambiguity comes from having the list at the end of the sentence. If there had been some sort of setting given afterwards I think things would be far less vague.

1)      We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin to the party

2)      We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin to the party

3)      We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin, to the party

The appositive of JFK and Stalin in my third sentence guarantees that JFK and Stalin are the strippers; however, there is still a choice in the first of how many people exactly were invited. I also concede that in your second sentence, JFK can be considered an appositive.

That said, there are many ways to write almost any given sentence that alter the meaning just a smidge. Essentially language is entirely up to the reader to interpret because there are so many bizarre grammar and sentence structure combinations and guidelines to consider. There will always be ambiguity and room for improvement in (most) any written sentence. I don’t think there would be any ambiguity if the sentence was said aloud, as our pauses and inflections would explain everything away.  

I don’t even think ambiguity in language is necessarily a bad thing. The best argument I’ve heard for the Oxford comma, though, is that it more accurately maps spoken intonation to punctuation. (That is, it puts a comma in a spot where people do tend to pause in speech.) But the important point here is that both possibilities allow ambiguity.