![]() Oakhurst Dairy served up a lot of food imagery. Possibly (but improbably) for this reason, in an effort to illustrate (or not) ambiguity in a series, the coverage of O’Connor v. Lest we lose perspective, this law on the books of the State of Maine applies to people who work with perishable foods, and the point is that pokey employees should not be rewarded for taking their sweet time getting the goods to market. To the defendant’s contention that the series, in order to support the drivers’ reading, would have to contain a conjunction-“and”-before “packing,” the drivers, citing Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner, said that the missing “and” was an instance of the rhetorical device called “asyndeton,” defined as “the omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence.” Lawyers for the defense conceded that the statement was ambiguous (the State of Maine specifically instructs drafters of legal statutes not to use the serial comma) but argued that it had “a latent clarity.” The truck drivers, for their part, pointed out that, in addition to the missing comma, the law as written flouts “the parallel usage convention.” “Distribution” is a noun, and syntactically it belongs with “shipment,” also a noun, as an object of the preposition “for.” To make the statute read the way the defendant claims it was intended to be read, the writers would have had to use “distributing,” a gerund-a verb that has been twisted into a noun-which would make it parallel with the other items in the series: “canning, processing,” etc. Barron’s opinion in the case is a feast of subtle delights for anyone with a taste for grammar and usage. Therefore, these exemptions do not apply to drivers, and Oakhurst Dairy owes them some ten million dollars. Truck drivers do not pack food, either for shipment or for distribution they drive trucks and deliver it. The issue is that, without a comma after “shipment,” the “packing for shipment or distribution” is a single activity. ![]() According to Maine state law, workers are not entitled to overtime pay for the following activities: “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce (2) Meat and fish products and (3) Perishable foods.” Here are the facts of the case, for those who may have been pinned under a semicolon. While advocates of the serial comma are happy for the truck drivers’ victory, it was actually the lack of said comma that won the day. ![]() At The New Yorker, it is a copy editor’s duty to deploy the serial comma, along with lots of other lip-smacking bits of punctuation, as a bulwark against barbarianism. The Times, like most newspapers, does without the serial comma. Individual publications have guidelines that sink deep into the psyches of editors and writers. ![]() People love it or hate it, and they are equally ferocious on both sides of the debate. Nothing, but nothing-profanity, transgender pronouns, apostrophe abuse-excites the passion of grammar geeks more than the serial, or Oxford, comma. ![]() Oakhurst Dairy) has warmed the hearts of punctuation enthusiasts everywhere, from the great dairy state of Wisconsin to the cheese haven of Holland. The case of the Maine milk-truck drivers who, for want of a comma, won an appeal against their employer, Oakhurst Dairy, regarding overtime pay (O’Connor v. ![]()
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