the perils of not using an Oxford comma

I’ve completely stolen it off Twitter; click the picture. You can all complain that I’m a punctuation Nazi, but don’t come crying when it all goes pearshaped. English is like minimalist furnishing: we love it all lovely and simple and clean – but it only works if you know how to do it right, and use the right materials.

As I said to my mild-mannered colleague today, when he mild-manneredly remarked, “It seems like an awful lot of hyphens…”

“If you think it’s too many hyphens we’d better re-word the sentence. We do use these words a lot. But it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it’s still a compound adjective.”

Happy days!

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