Now that I’ve been at Microsoft for over two months now, I thought I’d take a moment and reflex for a minute. As each day comes up, I find it to be slightly different than the prior one, which is a great thing, but I have discovered two two constants throughout my time here so far: I bump into something new everyday and whatever it is, it usually forces me to think. Everyday. But over the course of my time here, there was something that made me go pale and cold when I heard it… and that asks the question: What’s the scariest question I’ve been asked at work?
Is English your native language?
I swear the look on my face said “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”
Fact: Microsoft is a melting pot of cultures, so not everyone’s native language is English, even if everyone there speaks it at work. And English itself is a painful language, when compared with the other Latin based languages. We have lots of exceptions, and irregularities, plus our slang changes hourly… it’s like not an easy language to deal with, ya know? I remember when I took Spanish… I could conjugate predicates into tenses that I didn’t understand in English, because the rules were the same for almost every verb… of course the problems I had with vocabulary made me stone-cold dense in the language. I can also say anything that is written in Italian, after only having three months of it; every phonetical aspect was covered and the rules are absolute in the text book version of the language. English is not so giving.
So when someone comes to me with a question like this, that means that I’m supposed to know most of the nuances of my native language, right? I mean I’ve taught, I’ve been published, I’ve been blogging for years… I should be pretty adept at English, yet I was still a bit worried. I already know that I can’t spell anything without a spell checker. My grammar is very shaky on first drafts and I remember every single painstaking hour of proofreading that I had to do on the book’s draft, and there were many hours.
Then I hear the question and I knew that my tension was warranted: if you have three things in a row, such as “red, green, or blue”, do you put in a , before the or, or not?
I thought about it. I remembered back to one of my middle school classes where we were taught a bunch of language rules, and saw an answer. It was in this class that I was taught that for “and” and “or” it would be “red, green or blue”
– never should you have a , before a conjunction. But then I thought about it some more. I also taught in this class that all book titles should be underlined and that if a name ended in s, it should not be treated as a plural – if Chris has a book, it was Chris’s book and not the boys’ book – because it wasn’t a plural statement. We also were taught that if we were typing something, every period should be followed by a double space.
How strong were the lessons? Strong enough to say that every . in this post has a double space after it, even if you don’t see it that way, and we’re talking 20 after the lesson itself.
The world has changed and so have these rules, I’ve been forced to realize, over time. From publishing I learned that the double space is a huge no-no. So is underlining books: you should italicize book titles now, because hyperlinks make underlined text confusing in print. Who knew? Also the whole bit about proper name possessions have changed too, because every I see a license plate declaring that this room is owned by Chris, it’s “Chris’ room”. And I’ve a grouping like “red, green, and blue” in a number of books with the , before the conjunction, so I figure that that has changed as well.
And so, that’s the answer I gave: “I think it’s with the , but…” and left it like that. What I don’t get is how can these grammar… grammar rule makers? Who’s in charge of this anyway? And how can they expect laymen to know these rules if they change from time to time? After all, for a language to change this much in 20 years since to be a bit excessive! Are there bulletins published? An RSS feed that we should all know about? Seems pretty nuts to me… I know that the body of literate citizens is waning, but knowing this, how much blame can we accept for this mess? You don’t have to worry about changing punctuation rules when watching TV – it stays constant over the years, even if HDTV and EDTV have butchered the technological playing field…
I wish it was an obscure C# question – I would have had more confidence that it was accurate information.
The comma item you describe is the so-called “Oxford comma,” so-called because folks at Oxford University Press like it. Some style guides love it, others loathe it, still others say to use it if it clarifies things. More on it here, here,
and here.
It’s also known as the Harvard comma or the serial comma. It’s a lot more common in the US than in Britain (OUP aside). It’s the form I prefer, which is why it caught my eye in your post …
As a broader answer to your post, grammar (and spelling) suffer from being both prescriptive (telling you what the rules are) and descriptive (telling you what folks actually do). Some folks want them to be all one or the other, and certainly teachers pretend that they are prescriptive (while lit types in college will argue just as vehemently that they ought be only descriptive).
The fact is, languages either evolve with the times or die. The efforts by the French Academy of Language to keep non-French words from polluting French lips are rightfully scorned. By the same token, if there are no rules, it’s impossible to tell signal from noise, and so treating things like “Ebonics” as being as worthy of study and reinforcement as standard English is also rightfully scorned.
Heck, just look at the variation in different flavors of C (or HTML, for that matter) in different compilers or browsers; if the CS types of the world can’t agree on the “rules,” how can the rest of humanity?
Aaaaand … I see that a href tags are blocked. In which case I suggest you do a Google on “Oxford comma” for all the skinny on that. :-)
One other clarification: putting the title of books in italics has nothing to do with the Web or hyperlinks. Underlining was used because that was the only thing that typewriters could do. The underlining *meant* “put this in italics.”