Posting my thoughts and ideas to this page hasn't exactly been in my index of habits as of late. The new habits are the entirely worthless time-wasting habits as opposed to doing stuff like this, where I'm wasting my time, but it just doesn't feel like it.

I wanted to talk about something odd, but still near and dear to me. This something has to do this the syntax, or structure, of sentences in the English language. This is about the conjunction "and" and how to list more than two items using "and" and commas. One way drops the comma before the last "and". For instance, some will say, "I really want to chow down on some macaroni and cheese, pizza and pastrami." Whereas some will include the comma, like so, "I really want to chow down on some macaroni and cheese, pizza, and pastrami." I hope you see the problem with the first method of using commas. When you include a couple of grouped words in the list (macaroni and cheese) and then have no comma before the final "and" (pizza and pastrami), how do you clearly differentiate between that and the first set of words if there were no clear context to infer from? Anyways, there are two standards out there, some journalists still use the first standard I've presented, and repeatedly seeing such folly has goaded me into writing about this topic right here.

Next week I'll go over why the two spaces after a period is a practice which should have exited the scene along with typewriters, and how the QWERTY keyboard layout should have done the same, although I haven't yet tried the alternate Dvorak standard since that's just a little too ostentatious, even for me.

posted by Brett @ Sunday, June 24, 2007