Oxford comma dilemma

[HotCrossBunplease]

I have started working on a new project and have a colleague whose job it is to manage internal communications. She is lovely and very experienced.

I am the “figurehead” of the project in that all internal messaging says to contact me, and I am responsible for setting the overall tone and content, so I write a first draft and then pass to her for comments.

She has just come back with suggested amendments to our first big announcement and she has sprinkled Oxford commas all over the place. I can’t stand them. Two instances are new lists that she has added, based on wording that I had used in a different sentence structure. A third is a list that was in my original draft, to which she has just added the OC. As you can imagine, the third one rankles the most!

I really want to point out that my original was not wrong and that OCs are a matter of personal style. I could pull rank and make her remove them but that would make me an arsehole and set our working relationship off on the wrong foot. My sentence was this:

“Training will be provided in English, French and Portuguese.”

which has now become

“..English, French, and Portuguese”

The ones she has added are:

“Their enthusiasm, insights, and feedback have been invaluable”

and

“considering the broader impact of [project] on our clients, our practice, and the way we do business.”

I know that OCs are not wrong. I also know that not a single reader will care (apart from one friend of mine in the company who knows about my visceral objection to OCs and will find it hilarious).

Not sure what I even want from this post. A bit of solidarity maybe?

Ah, I see! Jolly good 😁

Thank you for that explanation.
I finally see what pp was saying 😅

I don’t agree with the thinking though.
The comma still has the name ‘Oxford comma’ because of where it’s positioned in the sentence.

Also I wasn’t shouting in my reply but limited ways to express emphasis 😂

I had to come back and post this after the “literally” derail earlier in the thread 🤣

Thank you all for the extended debate. I am #teamterracottateapot on the nomenclature.

I have decided that I am going to have the OCs removed from the text, citing personal preference and the fact that I went to Cambridge 😉.

Goodbye, farewell and goodnight.

Sleep well, sweet dreams, and don’t let the bedbugs bite ;)

Communication has gone out, sans Oxford commas. At one point I copied and pasted the OC-free list into an email and noticed that Copilot had engaged automatically and underlined it twice in blue. Lo and behold, when I clicked on the line I saw a “suggestion” that “adding a comma here could make the meaning clearer”. I smiled wryly and considered pasting this entire thread into Copilot. In the end I settled for a very firm “ignore”.

Colleague never explained why she had added them, even though I said “I’d prefer to remove, unless you feel strongly about them?” She just said “yeah sure”, and probably rolled her eyes!

Can we see the gite?

*Misses point

This side quest is precisely why I'd both rewrite the statement so that it contained the name of the duo - Simon & Garfunkel - as per their record label/official website (and the vast majority of their album covers for the last 62 years) and rearrange it so that they weren't the penultimate musicians on the list.

Simon & Garfunkel is correct. I wrote it as and for using it as an example.
I'd correct the ordering because, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, a list should be in alphabetical order.

I’m laughing a lot at the way that Simon & Garfunkel have become part of the fabric of this thread because I have been a dedicated fan of Paul Simon since I was 15, and I saw him live only a couple of months ago. 83 and still sounding pretty great. Artie I can take or leave to be honest, but I like him as a grammatical tool.

I've seen comma butterflies in the garden this week.