About the UK

I wrote this with Taishi.

Many things have happened until today to form today’s UK. It originated such a long time ago, -upper paleolithic, from 5 to 6 century, by one of the Germanic tribes. At that time, a first part of the UK, England, was formed. Hundreds of years later, England was attacked by France and lost large parts of its own land, mainly Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. And another centuries later, because of subsequent attacks by kings of England,  England recovered Wales and changed its name to Kingdom of England at 1536. England attacked Ireland also, but it failed this time.

Aesop's Fables (Usborne)

With one swoop of his net, the man trapped the dove. You're coming with me, my beauty," he cried.
"Not if I can help it," thought the ant. (p.

)

Aesop's fables are famous the world over. Today, I'm going to introduce the Usborne Young Reading edition of Aesop's Fables.

The eight fables included in this volume are:

• The tortoise and the hare
• The thirsty crow
• The ant ands the dove
• The fox and the stork
• The mouse's tale
• The dog and the bone
• The fox and the crow
• The lion and the mouse

Problems with the final serial comma

Jeff Weintraub: Why it is vitally necessary to prevent the extinction of the final serial comma


Jeff quotes the following sentence:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

He then asks:

Can anyone think of a good reason to leave out that last comma in a series?

He doesn't allow comments on his blog, so I'm responding here. Here's an example of a sentence where use of the final serial comma could cause confusion:

I had lunch with my father, Barack Obama, and the Prime Minister of Australia.

In this sentence, it's difficult to know whether there were four people in the lunch party or three (with my father's name being Barack Obama, separated off from the rest of the sentence by a pair of commas). If we leave off the comma after "Obama", we get:

I had lunch with my father, Barack Obama and the Prime Minister of Australia.

 Theoretically, I suppose my father's name could be "Barack Obama and the Prime Minister of Australia", but if we follow common sense, we know that there were four people (including me) in the lunch party.

In other words, there are cases where non-use of the final serial comma causes ambiguity; equally, there are cases where using the final serial comma causes ambiguity.

The key point is that either practice can cause problems if the reader doesn't know in advance which practice the writer favours. Even then, if the reader can't be sure that the writer is consistent in that use, there's a possibility of ambiguity.

That is a good reason why publications need style guides. The New York Times, the Economist, and the Guardian are examples of publications that have such style guides. The New York Times is an example of a publication that actually follows its own style guide. When setting up a style guide, it is advisable to refer to other style guides, so that there is some consistency between them, and readers don't have to learn a whole new set of conventions every time they visit a different site.

In a way, the examples that Jeff and I are using are bad ones, in the sense that common sense is sufficient to disambiguate each sentence; they may actually support the idea that only pedants care about this type of thing. In general, though, I support the notion that at least professional writers (journalists, academics, and so on) should strive to be consistent in their writing and to make it known what kinds of guidelines they are following. For every nine (or possibly 99) cases where common sense comes to the rescue, there may be one where it really is impossible to judge the true meaning. In those cases, a track record on the part of the writer of following a certain convention can give readers the information they need to establish what the writer really means.