Alaskan Range: OUP
"Why did the OUP editorial board announce last month that the Oxford comma is obsolete and its use is no longer recommended?'' asks columnist and librarian Greg Hill. "Advocates of Oxford comma usage, including yours truly, are aghast...''
When Isaac Bashevis Singer said “Children don’t read to find their identity … They still believe in good, the family, angels, devils witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and other obsolete stuff,” I’m sure he was being sardonic, especially about punctuation, even though he didn’t use an Oxford comma after “punctuation.” The Oxford comma is another expression for “serial comma,” the second comma in “a, b, and c” instead of “a, b and c.” It acquired the Oxford appellation when it became a house rule of the prestigious Oxford University Press (OUP), publishers of serious biblical and scholarly texts, including the mother of all dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OUP style manual is still called “Hart’s Rules” after Horace Hart, a shoemaker’s son who rose from a “reading boy,” proofing sheets of type before printing, to become the most distinguished Victorian-era printer who led the OUP into publishing prominence. As head of OUP, his grammatical rules carried great sway throughout society, so why did the OUP editorial board announced last month that the Oxford comma is obsolete and its use is no longer recommended?
Advocates of Oxford comma usage, including yours truly, are aghast, for we appreciate its ability to thwart ambiguity. It should only be used when a series of things are being discussed, however, “The serial comma is one of the sanest punctuation usages in the written language,” Mary Williams wrote recently in Salon Magazine, “It gives each element of a series its own distinct place in it, instead of lumping the last two together.”
An example of comma-less ambiguity comes from Wikipedia, who cites “a newspaper account of a documentary about Merle Haggard: ‘Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.’” I didn’t even know same-sex marriage was legal in Muskogee.
Horace Hart was a noted printing historian and authored “Notes on a Century of Typography at the UOP 1693-1794.” Dr. John Fell was Dean at Oxford in the late 1600s, and a collector of early English type, including some identical to that used to print Shakespeare’s First Folio and other early works. His collection was bequeathed to OUP, and is reverently known as “the Fell type.”
Fell gained far more notoriety by punishing Tom Brown, the legendary British schoolboy and satirical poet, who in 1680 was an unruly Oxford student. Dean Fell wanted to expel young Brown, but offered a reprieve if he could translate a tricky Latin epigram. Brown succeeded with “I don’t like you, Sabidius, and I can’t say why; all I can say is I don’t like you.” Soon Brown transformed the epigram into the nursery rhyme, “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,/ The reason why I cannot tell;/ But this I know, and know full well, I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”
Dr. Fell’s obsolete type came to mind when watching the library’s “Twilight Zone” DVD that included “The Obsolete Man” episode. It’s about a librarian named Wordsworth who’s deemed obsolete and ordered destroyed by the government, which fears an informed public and has outlawed all books. It reminded me about a library book I recently read, a manga called “Library Wars.” Manga is a Japanese comic book form that’s enormously popular there among all age groups, and increasingly so here, too.
“Library Wars” is described in Wired.Com’s GeekDad reviews as “In a future where the government creates a special committee to destroy books that are ‘unsuitable,’ libraries and local governments respond by forming a special military unit to preserve books.” The GeekDad site is excellent for parents wanting to familiarize themselves with these books that are both popular with children and representative of a very different culture. Besides a good summary, it includes sections on “What kids will like about it” and “What parents will like about it.”
After 5,000 years of adapting to advances in communications technologies, I’m not worried about libraries becoming obsolete. We still, collect, organize, protect, and disseminate information, just in digital formats instead of clay tablets. As Will Sherman pointed out in “33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important,” “Not everything is on the Internet,” “the Internet Isn’t Free,” “Library attendance isn’t falling – it’s just more virtual now,” and “Physical Libraries Can and Are Adapting to Cultural Change.” Except for those Oxford commas.
