Who would have ever guessed how commas and their usage fascinate land surveyors? Much great creativity is displayed in the thread, now far below, discussing the ups and downs of the Oxford comma. I especially enjoyed the example involving Merle Haggard and his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.
In your own post you point out the importance of proper punctuation.
A friend of mine used to send me emails with absolutely zero puntuation or capitalization. You would be suprised at how many ways things can get interpretted.
Since we've exhausted Oxford commas, when do we get to discuss the merits of Future Perfect Tense? My 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Keys, loved to torture us by having us diagram future perfect tense sentences on the board in front of the entire class. “It’s like time travel, children” she’d taunt.
I read somewhere that she was called out of retirement in the early '00s to work over Gitmo detainees with a form of interrogation called “chalk boarding”.
This Stuff Can Cost Money
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25comma.html
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2011/11/01/comma-placement-makes-the-difference/
