Pearls of Wisdom: Love, life, and punctuation

If I had to trace the love affair/obsession back to its origins, I suppose it began in high school, somewhere around the time I wrote my first newspaper column, titled “Love, Life, and Lisa.” Blame it on the ear-gratifying melody (one, pause, two, pause, three) or the satisfying substance of three individual pieces of evidence or detail. Or chalk it up to eye-gratifying beauty and the blindness of true love. The bottom line is that, for reasons still unclear to me, I have a deep, abiding affection for tri-part lists.

In the interest of full disclosure, and because I generally like to explore the psychological underpinnings of my affections, I will admit to my slightly obsessive-compulsive, indiscriminant love of lists in general. Particularly at times like the present, when I’m doing about five different things at any given time (i.e., right now, when I’m simultaneously monitoring my class, keeping tabs on my email, and writing this column), my life consists of many, many Post-Its. Seriously. I have them everywhere — on my desk at school, on my desk at home, in my car, on (and sometimes in) my fridge, atop my other Post-Its. When it gets particularly bad, I have Post-Its to remind me to take the appropriate Post-Its with me when I head out the door in the morning. I’ve tried shopping with my school to-do list. It doesn’t work very well.

But I digress. This column is not about my affinity for/reliance upon brightly-colored sticky pads. This column is about my very specific love of lists of three. In the erudite and inane world of English grammar, these are also known as “serial lists.” At least that’s what Wikipedia just told me. The truth is that, even after one brilliant quarter of WCT (that would be PWR before it was renamed and turned into a mandatory two-quarter sequence), four years as a fairly successful English major, and two-plus years as an English teacher, I actually know very little grammar. Very, very little. In fact, the bulk of my “knowledge” comes from the words (imperatif, subjonctif) I picked up in my high school French class. And just because I can translate the latter to “subjunctive” doesn’t mean I have any idea what it is in English.

For most of my life, I disguised my grammatical ineptitude by following what “sounded” right to my avid reader’s visual ear. But then I became a teacher, and suddenly it wasn’t enough to just say that lists of three sound better/look right with two commas in them. That’s when I broke out “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” and started realizing what a grammatical black hole we live in. Not that I go around pointing out miswritten signs or correcting peoples’ use of good/well or I/me; English Lovers are not to be confused with Grammar Nazis, and I, for one, am thrilled when people actually write out entire words (b/c itz ez to abbr evrythng in txt msgs, so why bother writing any other way?).

All of this is to say that, although I have long-since been a user (and occasional abuser) of the Oxford comma, I had never heard of it when my mom asked me about the term last weekend. Consulting Wikipedia, I learned that, in addition to being a now-defunct band from Gainesville, Florida and a song by a New York indie band, Vampire Weekend (which is how my mom learned of the term — her friend’s daughter’s boyfriend’s dog is in the band or something), the Oxford comma is “the comma used immediately before a grammatical conjunction (nearly always and or or; sometimes nor) that precedes the last item in a list of three or more items.”

And so the dawn broke. After all of these years, the love of my life finally has a name. And, apparently, a fair amount of controversy surrounding it. Proponents argue that it mimics speech (the pause before the “and”) and clarifies meaning; opponents contend that it’s redundant and occasionally introduces ambiguity. The Daily’s style guide does not include its use (a fact which has caused my editors serious grief; my columns are generally close to error-free — with the notable exception of the pesky Oxford comma, which is woven into the very fibers of my body and mind).
Wikipedia also notes that my favorite little symbol is also called the Harvard comma. Which makes me wonder: when will Stanford get its own punctuation mark? Personally, I would like to propose the coinage of the Stanford dash. A byproduct of the ever-multi-tasking Stanford Duck Syndrome, the Stanford dash occurs in the many multi-dash phrases we utilize on this politically correct, overcommitted campus. Consider the following examples: I’m a history-English-Poli Sci major. This summer, I’m going to be an EMT-surf instructor-sculptor in Costa Rica. Tonight, I’ll be studying-emailing-IMing-drinking, and definitely not sleeping.

As I envision it, the Stanford dash offers a means of integrating our fragmented identities, the metaphorical sticky gum that promises to hold our many-Post-It-noted lives together. In fact, I now realize, there is something equally unifying about the Oxford comma, the little curlicue that visually adjoins otherwise disparate lists of three. As with the other forms of attraction in my life, apparently my punctuation predilections follow a trend.

However, unlike the other attractions I’ve experienced to date, I’m fairly certain that my love affair with the Oxford comma will never dissipate, disintegrate, or disappear.

Scratch that. Even after five years on the Stanford dating scene (if that’s not an oxymoron), the romantic in me still believes in the uncomplicated simplicity of the Oxford-less adage: True love never dies.

Lisa is also aware of her weakness for parentheses. (To join her support group, email her at lisame@stanford.edu).a