Punctuation hanging out

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Reprinting an xkcd from last fall:

Mouseover title: "The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively."

Note from that post:

I guess Penn, Brown, Berkeley, CalTech, …, should be grateful for being left out.

I'll spare you our past posts on the Oxford comma, except this one.

Maybe I'll add a link to "Comma/Period ratios" (1/6/2025) as well, but I'm still sparing you the dozens (hundred?) of other LLOG comma commentaries



7 Comments »

  1. Haamu said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 9:25 am

    Maybe I'm just in the right mood this morning, but that might be her best one yet.

  2. Brett said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 10:34 am

    It's the Ellipsis that really raises it to the next level.

  3. Laura Morland said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 12:17 pm

    I find myself quite troubled by the premise: is my beloved Atlantic truly dropping my even-more-beloved Oxford comma?

    [insert worried-face emoji here]

  4. Laura Morland said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 12:24 pm

    P.S. The xkcd strip continues to crack me up.

    Why? Often, when my mathematician husband wants to change topics, he'll say, "Comma." To which I always reply, "No, Period!"

    And guess what: he has *two* degrees from MIT. xkcd knows wherof it punctuates.

  5. JPL said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 3:02 pm

    I'm still not sure about the difference between, e.g., for a start, "the in-out relation", and "the quid facti/quid juris distinction" and other examples of that general sort. I often don't know and can't say explicitly which one would be correct, so I just leave it to whatever "intuition" is (as I understand the term — maybe I ought to just say, "I just leave it to the tacit dimension").

  6. Julian said,

    April 8, 2025 @ 8:56 pm

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the comma after "please" was the New Yorker comma.

  7. KeithB said,

    April 9, 2025 @ 8:59 am

    What? No mention of Victor Borge's audible punctuation?

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