‘Good Grammar’ Comes From Privilege, Not Virtue
The hunger to justify underdog grammar details—beloved Oxford comma included—has an ugly side. It can hurt people.
A punctuation mark has a fandom. As an editor, I should be giddy. A nuance of language is having its day! But my gut has drawn itself down.
I’m talking, of course, about the Oxford comma and those wild sentences that prove the universe will lose its bearings without it. Like, “We invited the alpacas, my mom and my dad,” in which the absence of a comma after “mom” suggests that the person speaking is the offspring of mountain camels. Or, “His tour included encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector,” which leaves open the possibility that Mandela led a literally magical existence.
The same zeitgeist drives the recent popularity of the “grammar vigilante” of Bristol, England. This hooded figure has been committing vandalism to purge errant apostrophes from storefronts, claiming that incorrect possessives are the real crime. Sticklers around the world have cheered his efforts. A number of editors, however, could not bring…
