Comments Elsewhere

N.B.: commas in English mostly serve a rhetorical or poetic function, not a syntactic function. They exist, mainly, to modify the scansion of a sentence not, usually, to modify the grammatical role of phrases within it. That’s OK: languages both written and spoken have many devices for structuring the syntax other than commas. The most brilliant and ordinary writers of the ancient world got along fine for centuries without any commas at all (or semicolons, or periods, or indeed even any spaces between words). Somehow literate civilization kept on keeping on. If you’re freaking out the Oxford comma or whether or not someone is going to be confused about your meaning when you write “To my parents, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger,” then you are probably worrying about the wrong thing.