First and foremost: We reject the renaming of the Oxford comma as “the People’s Comma” and deny our alleged role in foisting an “elitist” term on the public. It has been the standard in the Oxford Style Manual for more than a century. It has earned its patrician moniker.
It has also earned its reputation as a scourge of American business. Every comma is an extra stroke of the key. Every extraneous stroke of the key is a moment of productivity lost—a moment that could be spent striking a more meaningful key. Each year, the Oxford comma is costing American business countless hours of worker productivity.
And since time is money, the Oxford comma inflates the cost of every product it stains, from blog posts to packaging to your favorite popular novel. Soon American writers and editors and their employers will no longer be able to compete with offshore copy mills whose writers work for pennies on the dollar.
What is the price of the occasional misunderstanding of the relationship among items in a series? Is the Oxford comma worth destroying the American workplace? Is it worth your job, your brothers or your sisters?
Have you seen what’s happened to England in the last century? Not pretty. Think about it.