Mea Culpa: Serial killers

Susanna Richards catalogues the errors in last week’s Independent

A harmless creature like the comma should be handled with care, respect, and a little trepidation (Getty/iStock)

The serial comma – also known as the Oxford or Harvard comma – is pretty unpopular among the literary classes. Not for its own modest properties – it is unarguable that it serves a function, as a mark that is inserted before the final item in a list – but because allusion to it by anyone in the public eye is bound to elicit an eruption of antipathy, often from those who do not properly understand the purpose of this small yet oddly obtrusive device. This is followed invariably by the patient explanation of why it matters, by those who do.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? There is plenty of comma-based discourse already within the editorial department, and that’s without invoking this particular djinn. So we don’t talk about it unless we have to. Last week we were asked to issue a statement, which I’m proud to say was sensibly brief and phlegmatic: our considered view is that commas are both overused and misused. And that unless clarity itself is at stake, the use of a serial comma is not necessary – though sometimes clarity is at stake, and so, to my mind, it does no good to cast the poor little creature as a cuckoo in the nest. After all, it is only an ordinary comma on secondment (I pay mine extra for special ops).

Bear with: We managed to attribute responsibility to entirely the wrong party last week in a wonderful article charting some of the strange behaviour surrounding the Queen’s funeral. “There were also outcries against guards’ hats made from the fur of black bears by animal rights groups,” we wrote, apparently oblivious to the double meaning. Obviously the animal rights groups do not make the hats, and a little syntactic rearrangement ensured that this was clear. Thanks go to Paul Edwards for letting us know about it.