New Yorker Cartoon Goes Out To All The Diehard Oxford Comma Lovers

A New Yorker cartoon by Emily Flake is giving life to grammar obsessives today, by illustrating just how consequential an Oxford comma can be.

For anyone who doesn’t spend sleepless nights tossing and turning over the controversial punctuation mark, a brief explainer: the Oxford comma is the last comma in a list, that comes before the “and” or the “or.” Some think it’s necessary, others redundant, and many just don’t care. (What do you think?)

The lovely lady pictured below, however, seems pretty firmly in camp “necessary.”

Earlier this month, the contentious comma was the deciding factor in a $10 million lawsuit involving overtime pay for dairy farmers. When announcing his verdict, the judge opened with: “For want of a comma, we have this case.”

Given recent events, a comma-induced divorce doesn’t sound entirely implausible. We just wonder who will get the dogs, house and car.