Oxford Comma Cartoon

September 26, 2011

Comments

I’m not sure when “the strippers, JFK, and Stalin” would be used in a sentence given that Stalin died in 1953, when JFK was in his first year in the Senate and thus unlikely to be invited to parties with heads of state, but this is amusing nonetheless:

via Brian J. Noggle’s Facebook

4 responses to “Oxford Comma Cartoon”

Fiona

September 26, 2011 at 1:16 pm

My geeky editor friends (and fans of the Oxford comma) have been circulating this cartoon around. Gotta love it!
Jay Tea

September 26, 2011 at 2:03 pm

This cartoonist needs to hook up with the “Eats, shoots and leaves” guy.

J.
Stormy Dragon

September 26, 2011 at 11:48 pm

My favorite example of why you should use the extra comma is this newpaper photo caption:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/HaggardComma.jpg
David Bailey

September 28, 2011 at 10:58 am

Or, just re-order the sentence to read “we invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers”. It’s very hard to remove all sense of double meaning unless the whole sentence can be seen in context, but it’s still funny.