5 ms·

From purely a grammatical standpoint, it does. If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do

by nbroyal 14y ago

From purely a grammatical standpoint, it does. If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do would be to add a comma after 'policeman' because it is a parenthetical phrase (i.e. a nonessential bit of detail/information). Without the comma, it is to be parsed as a list. However, this isn't really a commonly known thing, so it's easy to see how the sentence could be interpreted in different ways.

burntsushi 14y ago
> If one was trying to indicate that George was, in fact, a policeman, then the grammatically correct thing to do would be to add a comma after 'policeman' because it is a parenthetical phrase (i.e. a nonessential bit of detail/information). Perhaps it's grammatically correct, but now it's ambiguous. Since "a policeman" could be a parenthetical phrase or just another item in a list. I'd rather something be obviously wrong then unobviously ambiguous. (I'm not advocating for or against the Oxford Comma in the general case. But here, the right approach is a rephrasing, as suggested by the GP.)
- nbroyal 14y ago
  Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear in my response. I didn't mean to imply that adding a comma to the original sentence in question was the correct way to write that sentence. I was simply trying to state that without the Oxford comma, according to grammar rules, the intent is clear, as the article implies.
- deleted 14y ago
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