A very expensive comma!

An Oxford comma is the comma before the final ‘and’ or ‘or’ in a list of items. An example would be the comma before the ‘and’ in the following list: apples, oranges, pears, and bananas.

There are some people who have strong opinions about whether to use it but most people don’t really care and would probably agree with the first line of the song “Oxford comma” from the band, Vampire Weekend. They interpret the sentence as meaning the same thing whether it has an Oxford comma or not.

The argument in favour of using the Oxford comma is that it removes ambiguity. On the Wikipedia page for serial comma, they give the following examples.

If a book is dedicated “To my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope” some people could conclude that the author’s parents are Mother Teresa and the Pope. If there is a comma before the final “and” this ambiguity is removed.

However, the Wikipedia page also gives an example of a dedication “To my mother, Mother Teresa, and the Pope” where ambiguity is introduced by the addition of the oxford comma. Someone reading this dedication could conclude the author’s mother was Mother Teresa.

At this stage, you may be looking at the title of this post and wondering why the word “expensive” is there. The reason for this is that the lack of an Oxford comma could cost haulage companies in the state of Maine $10 million.

In 2014 three truck drivers took a class action saying there were entitled to overtime payments. The companies they worked for said they were not entitled to this and had not made overtime payments because the law stated overtime rules do not apply to:

“The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;

(2) Meat and fish products; and

(3) Perishable foods.”

The truck drivers’ argument was that they were not involved in “packing for shipment”, or “packing for distribution”. They were just involved in distribution. The court agreed with this reasoning in this judgement. There is approximately $10 million in overtime payments which now must be made to the truck drivers of Maine.

I guess some companies shall treat the Oxford comma much more seriously now.