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18/11/10 14:52Once I cried because of an Oxford comma, and as much as I may die a little inside whenever I see someone write "comeupins" or "faux paw," that has permanently put me on the side of the descriptivists.
I just remembered this because I remembered being told about Mao Zedong and about Mao Tse-Tung, and not being completely sure that they were the same person, because none of my teachers ever thought it was appropriate to explain that there were different ways to romanize Chinese words and people didn't always agree about what way you should use. We just went along with it: some years it was one, and some years it was the other, and since the only world history teacher I had in high school pronounced Hirohito's name as "hithero" I didn't have a good grasp on what I should think.
It was the same with the Oxford comma. One teacher told me it was right; another teacher told me it was wrong, and I was really upset. It would have been okay if there had been a lot of rules for me to follow, because I'm good at following rules, and I am comforted by order in the universe. But if the rules can change on you -- if the right thing can turn into the wrong thing arbitrarily and without explanation -- that is not okay.
I went through seven schools in four school districts in two languages before I got out of high school. Consistency was not a strong point in my education. But I wish that just once I had been told, "this is not an absolute rule; this is not handed down from on high; this is one accepted style. This is the way we're doing things in this class."
It was really kind of freeing to realize that not only was the Oxford comma this way, but basically everything in grammar is arbitrary. Which doesn't mean you can't set standards and rules -- it just means you can't uphold those rules as somehow objectively, morally superior. And that was my first great infatuation with linguistics.
I still favor the Oxford comma, myself.
I just remembered this because I remembered being told about Mao Zedong and about Mao Tse-Tung, and not being completely sure that they were the same person, because none of my teachers ever thought it was appropriate to explain that there were different ways to romanize Chinese words and people didn't always agree about what way you should use. We just went along with it: some years it was one, and some years it was the other, and since the only world history teacher I had in high school pronounced Hirohito's name as "hithero" I didn't have a good grasp on what I should think.
It was the same with the Oxford comma. One teacher told me it was right; another teacher told me it was wrong, and I was really upset. It would have been okay if there had been a lot of rules for me to follow, because I'm good at following rules, and I am comforted by order in the universe. But if the rules can change on you -- if the right thing can turn into the wrong thing arbitrarily and without explanation -- that is not okay.
I went through seven schools in four school districts in two languages before I got out of high school. Consistency was not a strong point in my education. But I wish that just once I had been told, "this is not an absolute rule; this is not handed down from on high; this is one accepted style. This is the way we're doing things in this class."
It was really kind of freeing to realize that not only was the Oxford comma this way, but basically everything in grammar is arbitrary. Which doesn't mean you can't set standards and rules -- it just means you can't uphold those rules as somehow objectively, morally superior. And that was my first great infatuation with linguistics.
I still favor the Oxford comma, myself.