Learned is a weekly newsletter about words and language, written by me (@misterbob), and published every Monday. If you're interested in getting each week's letter delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for free right here: http://learned.substack.com. Thanks!

This week's excerpt comes from a section of the newsletter called Sidetracks, where I write about the strange and interesting things I learned about while researching and writing the main letter. Please enjoy this little bit about a controversial bit of punctuation - The Oxford Comma.

Me, myself, and I, or,me, myself and I? That comma after myself in the first iteration of the phrase is called the Oxford Comma :

The ‘ Oxford comma ‘ is an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list:
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It’s known as the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press.

There is some…debate…over whether it should be used:

• The Oxford Comma is Extremely Overrated
• The Oxford Comma is Pretentious
• I Hate the Oxford Comma: Why You Don’t Need the Oxford Comma
• 14 Reasons You Should Use the Oxford Comma
• The Subtle Necessity of the Poor, Hated Oxford Comma
• 15 Reasons You Should Definitely Use the Oxford Comma

It ought to come as no surprise to anyone who reads anything I write - I’m all in on the Oxford Comma. A list is defined by its cohesiveness and adding in the final comma before and delineates that the item after and is, in fact, the final item and not an addition to the previous item. It can best be summed up by in the joke from which a famous (and one of my favorite) style guide takes its name :

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."