knife

A classic concern of so many apparently insecure people is spelling and punctuation and there's endless little quizzes and assessments you/they can make of someone by how they invoke little squiggles on the screen, like reading tea-leaves but discrete and soulless. A favorite is the so-called Oxford comma. I suspect its favored status as a means to evince education or something half-comes from the gilded name-dropping, like, would anyone give a shit if it was called the Cleveland comma?

fwiw I use this comma because I love adornment and extra squiggles, but the facebook-level comics advocating its utility note the ambiguity that can arise from not using it: we invited the strippers, jfk and stalin. Here it's not clear whether it's a string of three coordinated nouns: [the strippers] and [jfk] and [stalin] or whether it's an 'appositive': [the strippers] namely [jfk and stalin]. Already it's dumb casual whateverphobia of tarting up those 20th century men as frivolous and absurd women, which doesn't offend me so much as it causes me vicarious embarrassment.

But spelling and in this case punctuation is just fashion, stilted table manners and utensil placement, and expressing an opinion on the Oxford comma can only be (consciously or not) a means to convey the most superficial veneers of your education. The jfk thing above is about as compelling and funny as being an absolute card at the banquet by using a steakknife to butter some bread.

Also, it's fun to by-your-logic the exact opposite conclusion. The ambiguity between coordination and appositives is only found sentence-finally. Anywhere else, the appositive meaning is traditionally indicated by yet another comma: The strippers, jfk and stalin, were invited.

In fact, the use of the Oxford comma can create it's own coordination-appositive ambiguity because the second, Oxford comma on it's own makes for potential appositive readings, anywhere in a sentence: my dad, the pope, and jane were invited/we invited my dad, the pope, and jane. In both instances there is ambiguity between: [my dad] and [the pope] and [jane] versus [my dad namely the pope] and [jane]

the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity anywhere, but not using it can only introduce ambiguity sentence-finally.

But even by-your-logicing this shit is a dumbass game. The real opinion to have is: who gives a shit, ambiguity is fine, you'll be fine