Notable El Moments

Nearly every day, the moment that makes me take note of my surroundings happens while I’m on the El. Here is a short list of the notables lately:

A man standing next to me was making a crossword puzzle. Not filling it in…Making it. He had a notepad clearly designed for making crossword puzzles…

A man (possibly with a few screws loose) sang for us, and then backed out of the train at his stop, and bowed, saying “Thank you, Thank you…”

A man next to me on the morning train was oozing alcohol…apparently, he had had a lot of fun the previous night!

And finally…my El stop closed today for a year for repairs. I  went to my new stop, and it was swarming with CTA employees. And the weirdest thing…they they were all happy! There were probably 20 CTA employees, all of them smiling and bouncing around handling the extra traffic from the other stop closing…THAT was the weirdest thing I’ve seen!!

Pre-work Link

Before I head off to work, I thought some of you might enjoy this. (And some of you will roll your eyes and scowl with your Republican lips!)

BArack the Vote!

40s Are All The Rage

In other, slightly less academic news, when I walked home from work today, I came to a corner, and a man coming the opposite direction around the corner bumped into me pretty hard…While drinking a 40…At 6pm…In my very nice neighborhood. And he yelled at me, “Hey! Watchit, LADY!”

Yup. Gotta love city-livin’! 

More, More, and More

So after I posted about the serial comma this morning, I did a little research. Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on the serial comma. It turns out, the two schools of thought on using a serial comma comes down to this:

If you write using a journalistic style, you learned there is no comma before the “and” in a series. If you write using any other style, you learned to add the comma.

To expand on that, leaving the comma out seems to have come about as a reaction to limited column space in newspapers. Every character counts, therefore, that comma can go. It’s a space issue. It’s an expendable comma when you need to save space. This sentiment is most widely known from the AP Stylebook. On the other hand, The MLA Handbook, The United States Government Printing Office, The Chicago Manual of Style, The Elements of Style, and well, many others, all say use the comma.

To refer to my cousin’s comment, yes there are times when adding the comma makes the sentence more confusing. And in those situations, all of those style manuals would say leave the comma out, OR (and perhaps with slightly less laziness) rewrite your sentence.

Leaving the comma out can cause confusion, as well. Perhaps you remember the best seller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves? Lest we forget Pandas do not kill and runaway…

So at the end of the day, I have decided, that yes, there are books to back up not using the comma, but there are as many or (really) more that say to use the comma. So until I am told to use the AP Stylebook, or I start writing for The New York Times, I am going to consider myself correct.

(I do love that I got long, interested comments about this topic though, so please continue to comment on it!) 

Pet, Pet, and Peeve

I have a minor battle going on at work. We write a lot of packaging copy. Often that includes lists of benefits. There are two schools of thought on this topic, but I fall squarely into the following category:

If you have a series of things combined with the word “and”, you put a comma after the last thing in the list before the “and”. For instance, “one, two, and three” versus the other school of thought that says “one, two and three” is acceptable.

I cannot see how the second version became acceptable. The reason we have punctuation is because it guides the flow of writing, and creates a flow that mimics speech. There are other elements of punctuation that have changed over time (two spaces after the period, for one), but they mostly changed because of the advent of the computer, and don’t affect flow. This change has nothing to do with computers as far as I can see, and I can’t find a logically reason for NOT using the comma. When I speak the phrase “one, two, and three”, I pause before the “and”. One…two…and three. That is how it is spoken. Not one…two and three. You don’t quicken you pace between the “two” and the “and”.

My production artist refuses to put that comma in! It is driving me nuts. Yesterday he told me it was a “package industry standard.” He said it to shut me up. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know me well. That just got me thinking. So I have been looking at packaging. He is very wrong. It is common to do it both ways on packaging. AND, I even found two products by the SAME company that did it differently.

Unfortunately, I am not sure what I am going to do with this information. I don’t want to start an office war, but I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just err on the side of caution, and put in the frigging comma! He tried to tell me that it confuses consumers. Seriously??? PLEASE. If you are going to argue with me over something that has to do with writing, at least have a good argument.

Do any of you have a good argument for not using that comma?? I would really love to hear a good one so I can let this go.

Happy Blogging to Come

My life at the moment consists mostly of going to work, and watching–shhhh…it’s my guilty pleasure–Big Brother. I can’t help it. I love that show! It is like a social experiment in Cabin Fever! People seriously go nuts in there from boredom, and it makes for incredible entertainment!!

This poses a bigger problem, though. As these are my major activities, and I can’t write much about work for fear of a Dooce-like career change, and you probably couldn’t care less about Big Brother, it is leaving me with a lack of exciting blog topics. As I am figuring out what this blog is going to do, please be patient. I am going to start with some silly shallow stuff, and we will see where we go from here.

I should also note that this blog was an outlet for me for the last three and a half years. It was here to make me feel better, and to let me vent when I was sad, angry, and occasionally happy. Problem is, I am much happier now! I don’t have much to bitch about. Politics are good this election, my job is going well, my city makes me happy every day, and my general personal energy is in a happier place (to be all hippie about it). Hopefully, I am still able to write when I don’t feel like a tourtured soul, but I will have to do some experimenting.

Stick with me, and check back often. I hope to be writing more and more!