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Trixter | 11 months ago

Your reaction proves the entire point of the Oxford comma -- to eliminate this kind of confusion. It absolutely should have been written as "...Buyser, an AI, software, and data engineer."

There are more reasons to use an Oxford comma than not, and I remain continually surprised that it is not taught as the default.

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scubbo|11 months ago

I intentionally included "a semicolon" in my comment, because, no, even the sentence you wrote is susceptible to garden-path parsing. One _could_ read it as "...written by Buyser, and by an AI, and by software, and by...hmm, wait, there's no indefinite article on 'data engineer', I need to back-up and reparse".

(Just sharing grammatical curiosity, one ~~pedant~~ enthusiast to another - I agree with your second paragraph!)

Trixter|11 months ago

Pedantry welcome :-) I have always viewed the semicolon as a creative choice, and the comma as a technical requirement; hence, my reply.