Again the Pesky Comma...

Many have written to me asking (are you going to hate me for this Jeff? :D ) why I always tell them,

"Don't put a comma in front of conjunctions such as 'and' indiscriminately".

Usually, if you are just listing a series of things, this comma is superfluous. For example,

There are lions, elephants and monkeys in a circus.

However, there are exceptions to this rule. This has to do with the context and meaning. There are too many exceptions in English and this is what makes the language so difficult to master. Consider the following sentence, as shown in the photo...

"We invited the rhinoceroses (the plural is '~es' or just 'rhinoceros'  unchanged), Washington, and Lincoln." (would you consider omitting the 'and' altogether in such a case? )

This means we have three kinds of guests, one group of animals with single horns and two US presidents (even though it is absurd because they live in different time periods). This is not important, we can change the names to Bush and Clinton.

If the comma is omitted before the "and", as shown below,

"We invited the rhinoceroses, Washington and Lincoln."

the meaning becomes:

We had invited two rhinocerosesi named Washington and Lincoln!

It is the semantics that makes the comma so important. If we changed the sentence to,

"We invited the lions, monkeys and elephants"

Then there is no ambiguity as in the previous sentences. The lions are not named "monkeys" or "elephants"

This is English for you!