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Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute (nytimes.com)
Daniel VIctor, writing for The New York Times: A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded -- or totally necessary -- Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks. What ensued in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and in a 29-page court decision handed down on Monday, was an exercise in high-stakes grammar pedantry that could cost a dairy company in Portland, Me., an estimated $10 million. In 2014, three truck drivers sued Oakhurst Dairy, seeking more than four years' worth of overtime pay that they had been denied (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate link from a syndicated partner). Maine law requires workers to be paid 1.5 times their normal rate for each hour worked after 40 hours, but it carves out some exemptions. [...] The debate over commas is often a pretty inconsequential one, but it was anything but for the truck drivers. Note the lack of Oxford comma -- also known as the serial comma -- in the following state law, which says overtime rules do not apply to: "The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods. Oakhurst Dairy is arguing that "packing for shipment" and "distribution" are two different items in the list. But that's not how the truck drivers are seeing it. They argue that "packing for shipment or distribution" is one item.
I don't see how one can infer a comma where one doesn't exist. its pretty clear. you cant just edit a law that you don't like.
Looking past the arguments about commas, does anyone one know *why* there is no overtime pay for these specific jobs? How old is the law in question?
And you thought statistics was the only thing that could be interpreted "correctly" to argue either side of a debate...
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
have exceptions for overtime pay? Overtime pay exceptions were supposed to be for high paying desk jobs like CEO where it wasn't worth anyone's time/effort to calculate it. Jesus, just repel it entirely already and stop pretending. Or better yet, recognize that any law exempting people from OT will be written from the ground up with abuse in mind and not pass them.
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I see no ambiguity here. Of course, I also write parsers.
packing for shipment or distribution of X
=> packing for (shipment or distirbution) of X
NOT
=> packing for shipment of X, distribution of X
The Oxford comma makes no difference in an "or" sequence. It comes into relevance during "and" sequences.
The validity or rational of the law is a completely different subject, but as written, these drivers not only have no case, their argument displays a sufficiently questionable perspective on language that they should be tested for proper understanding of roadsigns before they are allowed to drive again.
Efforts to drop the comma originated with newspapers in a time when space on the printed page mattered. word groupings are always clear with it, and may, or may not, be clear without it.
It should be preserved in formal writing.
As the sentence is written in the article, the drivers won the case because the written sentence says exactly what they interpret it to say. The dairy company is on the wrong side of the language.
A comma after the word 'shipment' and before the word 'or' would have made the company the winner.
is another thing you haven't got straight. And of course the whole system of impractical units (also known as imperial units) where everything are sevenths, thirteenths, or twenty-eights, unless it's autumn or the goods are dry, in which case everything changes. Also, you're vs your, it's vs its, their vs they're. We could go on for miles (or preferably kilometers), but it's clear that you're great at making a complete mess.
Of course it's one item. If it were two, it would have to be separated by a comma. It's common sense at this point.
""The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods."
Anybody that can read at all, can tell the "packing for shipment or distribution of" part is two different items.
The dairy is correct.
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.
If "packing for shipment or distribution" was one item, then there would be another "or" before "packing":
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, or packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.
Because that "or" isn't there, the "or" before "distribution" makes "distribution" the final item in the list:
1. canning
2. preserving
3. freezing
4. drying
5. marketing
6. storing
7. packing for shipment
8. distribution
The meaning is plain and the court really needs to go back to elementary English class if they ruled otherwise.
Do you have ESP?
While the second half of the statement uses semicolons instead of commas, they clearly use the oxford comma version of grammar rules. Therefore you must assume the first half of the sentence is also using the same rules, so the truckers are right.
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If the intent was to have "packing for shipment or distribution" as one item it would read "storing, OR packing for shipment or distribution of:"
It's also not clear to me why any of those should be excluded from overtime.
The arguments on both sides of the oxford comma debate are generally around removing ambiguity.
Certainly, in this case, there is ambiguity, and the addition of the comma would remove that ambiguity immediately.
I think there are some cases where the addition of the comma can cause ambiguity, but there are an awful lot more cases where it removes it.
So the case has to revolve around the ambiguity caused by the lack of the comma, and to whom this ambiguity benefits.
(I'm on the side of the drivers! Oxford Comma for the win!)
Reminds me back in the days textbook had an example of missing comma in a legal document. Results was large sums of money and time spent in court. I have to admit there are times when I get scared of using a comma. I will avoid them in this post.
mfwright@batnet.com
It could only be two items because they are separated by a disjunctive conjunction.
Here is footage of the Maine legislature writing the law in question.
This didn't happen because of a comma, it happened because of American businesses' "plantation owner" mentality toward their fellow sovereign citizens. People are property, and property shouldn't complain when it's disposed of. It just so happens that the comma was an obvious hole in the armor of extra-Constitutional privileges and immunities that are typically enjoyed by one of America's [corporate] Ultra-citizens.
That dairy can't be too big. (What in Maine is?)
Just like Cal Berkeley yanked all 10,000 educational videos over a lawsuit, I wouldn't be surprised if the dairy says, "fuck you" and declares Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I work at a place where writing is actually one of the things we produce. We are, technically, "pros" at this.
We use AP style guidelines, which means no Oxford commas. It's infuriating, because it is just plain wrong. And there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it.
Just needed to vent a little, and it's nice that I'm not bottling up anger over an IT issue this time.
Anyway, basic reading of the quoted list shows the truck drivers are clearly and unambigiuously right. I have no idea what the issue is or why it matters, but the words say that packing for shipment and distribution are a single item on the list. Whoever wrote the list either deliberately meant it them as a single item, or they were the kind of fuckwit who eschews Oxford commas because they don't care if it's clear or not. One thing is 100% sure, though: they did not mean to say that they were separate items. While it is possible they were thinking of two items, there is 0% chance that they were attempting to communicate that.
Because if you're attempting to communicate, you fucking try.
I appreciate having a story that is directed explicitly towards the grammatically sensitive among us. It's good that Slashdot tries to cover its bases as far as keeping pedants appropriately stimulated.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
The second part of the sentence is written as a list, with a colon and semi-colons. To be very precise, the first part should have been a list, too. Clunky English, but would be accurate way to state the legal rule.
Given that this is a tech site, I think a lot of us would recognize the ambiguity in this sentence as a problem with design of the language. In this case, it is the way legal documents are written. As an earlier comment pointed out, Maine's own legislative manual says not to use the Oxford comma.
The solution to this ambiguity is to introduce other language constructs into the so called "legalease". This really should be analysed and corrected for future laws.
One suggestion is that they could introduce bullet points into the legal documents. Another possibility is that lists could also be explicitly declared through a list indicator... i.e. All lists must be put in parentheses and put in a delimited format. They should really consult architects and teachers of computer languages when standardizing on a format. But the point is that there should be no ambiguity when reading the document.
Politicians suck at writing clear, concise sentences.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just mandate that laws are written in an executable language, like Python or Scheme, and then it must go through rigorous testing.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
If this is contract law, whomever wrote the contract probably loses. You wrote it, it's on your head to make certain there are no ambiguities. Contract law tends to be the black and white on the page
Since this is municipal/state law, written by a non-involved party (you can chuckle, go ahead), I would expect that the intent of the law would play a part here and the interpretation may be swayed by the actual debate (if there was one) over what should be included and excluded. IANAL, but many court rulings seem to follow this precident - if you can't outlaw X because it's unconstitutional, and you realize that by outlawing Y (Which may be const.) you can outlaw X by simple wordsmithing, the law is probably going to get struck down.
And that's exactly how every law I've read around here looks. usually in a case like this, the sentence in the law would simply refer you to an appendix with a list of excluded tasks/professions, and that appendix would be a bulleted or numbered list.
... If I understand this correctly this means is that grammar and spelling Nazis actually serve a purpose other than to annoy the hell rest of us? Until now I had ranked them somewhere between hairdressers and telephone sanitisers and on the usefulness scale. Since I'll be travelling on space Arkship C with the workers to New Earth, to escape the Orange Menace that threatens to destroy Old Earth, and since I'm in charge of passenger scheduling, think I'll move the grammar Nazis from space Arkship B which is destined to settle a nearby black hole. I'm going to move them to Arkship A which will accompany Arkship C to New Earth where it's occupants will colonise the southern continent which they have decided to call Atlantis and whose capital are planning to call 'Galt's Gulch'. Grammar Nazis may be useful but I'm sure as hell not travelling all the way to New Earth on the same ship as those annoying little toadies. I'm sure the leaders, scientists and other high achievers on Arkship A will enjoy the endless conversations abut the finer points of grammar and spelling on the looooong journey to New Earth.
The (canning), (processing), ..., (packing for shipment) or (distribution)
A or B or C or D is the same as A or B or (C or D)
The whole list is a disjunction, and either the last item is (X or Y), a disjunction of two items, or X or Y are elements of the list.
Unless they are trying to argue that "A and B and (C or D)" is meant - given context, that is insane.
John_Chalisque
This illustrates why a near English, human readable language with a formally specified machine comprehensible grammar is needed. The other benefit of that is to provide precise definitions of what can and cannot be specified in legally binding agreements.
Who gives a f*...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
tasks = ['canning', 'processing', 'preserving', 'freezing', 'drying', 'marketing', 'storing', 'packing for shipment', 'distributing']
products = ['agricultural produce', 'meat and fish products', 'perishable foods']
overtime_exceptions = ['{} {}'.format(t, p) for t in tasks for p in products]
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
Are the terms defined?
Is there a distinction between "packing" and "distribution" of the 3 classes of items?
If they mean the same thing, then you couldn't argue that it means "packing for shipment or packing for distribution of: ..."
In that case, when you accept that the 2 actions are equivalent, i.e. A === B, you'd be saying "packing for A or packing for A", which is clearly redundant.
Maybe it's just a professional bias, but in my field, elements of a list are separated by commas. Why should it be otherwise?
viz.:
{ a, b, c }
Might makes right irrelevant.
"Let's eat Gramma"
(1) Just because of all this debate, it is "reasonable" to believe that there is ambiguity in the contract.
(2) If there is ambiguity in the contract, the judgement is always for the plaintiff.
Done.
Is there a distinction between "shipment" and "distribution" of the 3 classes of items?
Rather than what I typed:
Is there a distinction between "packing" and "distribution" of the 3 classes of items?
Since there is ambiguity, look at the language used to form the list:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, stoing, packing for shipment or distribution of
This is a list of verb forms (present participles) and so "shipment or distribution" (nouns) is a qualifier for "packing" and not additions to the list themselves. So from the context, or pattern, the "or" binds more tightly with the modifiers and not with the list. If the list was intended to include "distributing" or "shipping" it would have added the words in that form.
Because: natural language.
Or: { a, b, c=>{x,y} }
The law is not a program, human beings aren't computers. English is not a programming language.
Human languages have some ambiguity and laws cannot anticipate every scenario, but that's totally okay because (a) humans [as opposed to computers] are spectacularly equipped to solve fuzzy logic problems, and (b) our legal system has a robust framework for handling these ambiguities.
It's desirable to remove ambiguity in the law where reasonable because it is more efficient than going through the court system--but there's no seg fault just because some law has some kind of ambiguity in it.
Because we're not robots.
I agree. It seems bizarre to determine a truck driver's eligibility for overtime based on what is hauled in his truck. Would any legislature deliberately create a situation in which a truck driver is _sometimes_ eligible for overtime (hauling Atari "E.T." cartridges to the landfill) and sometimes not (hauling frozen chicken to a warehouse)? What if a trucker performs both activities in the same week?
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.
I think the lack of punctuation explains what the legislature intended. The number of commas determines the number of items on the list. The last item is everything after the last comma. Notice the lack of punctuation in "shipment or distribution". Those terms belong together because there is no punctuation to indicate otherwise. In like manner, there is no punctuation after the "for" so we end up with "for shipment or distribution". What does the "for" clause apply to? packing. The last item on the list is "packing", qualified by the rest of the words. If the legislature had something else in mind, they would have written this differently.
This should be easy. It is reasonable for a person to read that language as meaning either of the two asserted meanings. So, borrowing from contract law, if a clause is ambiguous, the ambiguity goes to the party NOT responsible for writing the clause. So, simply said, whomever is responsible for writing that language should lose. Presumably, it is the lobbyists who by proxy wrote it for the trucking company.
is parenthesis!
>"The dreaded -- or totally necessary -- Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks"
Properly called the "serial comma."
Why is the serial comma ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) dreaded? This is what I was taught as proper writing in a very good school system in the 80's. It is also what I use today. To me it seems logical, functional, lessens ambiguity, and makes common sense. (Note the use of it in that last sentence).
In spoken language, there is a pause between each element in a list and the following one. The comma is generally understood to represent this pause in writing.
"A [pause] B [pause] and C" would be transcribed as "A, B, and C". I still don't understand why we would want to remove the last comma. Seems kinda arbitrary and... unnatural.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Nathaniel Windsor Howe III has announced the dissolution of the white-shoe law firm Dewey Cheatem & Howe LLP.
"It was a wonderful 37 years, but Joe Dewey Cheatem and I have agreed to go our separate ways."
All of the exempted activities are gerunds. If the writers wanted the list of exemptions to include distributing, it would have also been written as a the gerund distributing.
-Dave
The problem is we don't have enough lexical tokens to build the grammar we want. Commas perform two distinct functions: they separate items on a list, and they separate grammatical clauses. It turns out that situations arise where you can't know which function a comma is performing without prior knowledge of the writer's intent.
Suppose I write, "I owe everything to Jocasta, my wife, and my mother." There's no telling whether I'm talking about two people or three. Even if you *know* I use the Oxford Comma to separate every single item in lists, there's no way to determine that's what I'm doing here; "Jocasta" and "my wife" may be the same person. The only way for you to figure out my meaning is to have prior knowledge of my wife's name.
Yet if I adopt the policy of *never* using the Oxford comma, that leads to equally ambiguous results. Try it. There is simply no way to fix this problem working with nothing but commas.
Now as a CS graduate, the solution is clear: I need distinct tokens to separate list items and appositive clauses. Suppose I use "+" for list items and em-dash to set off appositive clauses:
Or if you're Oedipus Rex:
But until a major style guide adopts distinctive punctuation marks, we're stuck with ambiguity. That means you have no choice but to read any list or appositive clause you've written with a critical eye, and then rewrite the sentence if it can be misinterpreted. The result may be awkward and ungainly ("I owe everything to my wife, Jocasta, and also to my mother.") and the whole process is irritating, but you have no choice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Who cares about a comma taking an extra space anymore? And I'll keep my double-space after a period.
"Things I hate: lists, Oxford commas, and irony."
- Robann Kerr, Youtube comment
RRK
The panda eats shoots and leaves.
The lack of a comma means that "and" is the conjunction between "shoots" and "leaves". What is the panda doing? Eating.
But consider this:
The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.
What is the [armed] panda doing? Eating, shooting, and leaving.
In the first example, there is no comma, and therefore the words are interpreted as a single action.
In the second example, 2 commas create a list with exactly 3 items.
How hard is it to disarm a panda? All you have to do is get rid the commas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Applying the panda scenario to today's crisis, it becomes obvious that commas determine the number of items on a list, and words in the absence of a comma are interpreted together when there is no punctuation to group them any other way.
The comma missing means the truckers are 100% right. You can't just ignore grammar when you don't want to pay someone overtime.
Mathematicians solved this problem long ago. It's called the order of operations. We just need to start using parentheses to indicate grouping.
The list is a set of exemptions to a law, and it's reasonable to interpret an ambiguous set of exemptions minimally.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This is not a company manual! The statement comes from Maine Revised Statutes, Title 26, Chapter 7, Subchapter 3, 644, 3, F. Look it up if you don't believe me. I can just hear you now. It's a hack by the company to confuse Slashdoters.
Deck, not signed in
The way I actually read the text the last verb "packing" is what is exempt. The "shipment or distribution" should read as parenthetical clarification of what is being "packed"
, packing (for shipment or distribution).
But since it is unclear in total (the reason for this case) the "historical" interpretation should be the one that remains, until the legislature fixes its intention by clarifying said law/regulation.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I've always used the Oxford comma ever since I read this sentence:
"I'd like to thank my parents, God and Ayn Rand."
Much different meaning than
"I'd like to thank my parents, God, and Ayn Rand."
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Theater's were also exempted from paying minimum wage. It is true that theaters would have been put out of business if they were required to pay minimum wages for ushers, candy girls and cashiers. But we all exist in the same economic system. If a business can not pay then it should not exist. And it becomes even more perverted across industries. In the case under discussion we are considering truck drivers. Truck drivers are restrained by law for the hours they are allowed to drive or allowed to even be in a cab as a passenger or alternate driver. So getting paid much overtime pushes them into working a six or seven day week or they would be breaking one set of laws or another. What genius has decided that people pushed into working six days or seven days a week do not deserve over time pay? Matter of fact a driver working more than five days a week is a public hazard and also a hazard to their own health and well being. Being stuck in a chair bumping down a road for fifty hours a week surely must destroy one's health.
they should be paid at least enough to get them to the next season. This is why Donald Trump uses work visas for his seasonal workers. He doesn't pay enough for somebody to drop everything they're doing and work for him at Mar-a-Lago or whatever for 6 months. I'm always reminded of this.
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Here's what happens when you raise farm worker wages to the living wage. A pound of apples goes from $1 to $1.06 (adding a little to get it up to $15/hr since it's an old article).
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Commas matter....
"Let's eat, Grandma" vs "Let's eat Grandma!"
From a TV listing in The Times:
"By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."
It's none of the State of Maine's business how these parties conduct business. Would I violently impose these confusing points in a direct agreement with an employer? NEVER.
Now if you think about it, this could be an unnecessary comma for some folks, or in some situations where it is really not needed. But in information theory, redundancy is a plus--it avoids common errors. For example, in common English text, a period (or other end-marker like a question mark) ends a sentence, an extra space may follow, and a capital letter begins the new sentence. Three indicators that say -- OK, sentence ending, new one beginning. Very useful practically, because it reduces parsing time.
=-+
The law in question is almost certainly derived from, and similar to, the Fair Labor Standards Act of the 1930s.
The reason why ag and household workers are exempt from OT is that in the southern states, they are black, and in order to get the law passed, they needed the votes of racist southern senators and representatives who didn't think that "those kind" deserved OT.
As many have commented, there's no inherent reason why, even though the work is seasonal, they couldn't be paid OT. But that would have raised problems with minimum wage, too.
They wouldn't have tagged the end of a law clearly intended for seasonal factory work with covering all aspects of distribution. Distribution is the marketing, transporting, merchandising, and selling of any item. The law specifies marketing, but nothing else in the definition of distribution is used. So by using only a portion of the definition in the law, it's clear they didn't intend to extend overtime exemption to all aspects of distribution. So when the word distribution is used, it is only as a way to clarify a type of packing work that doesn't get overtime. If that wasn't the intent, then it was redundant that they specified marketing and they didn't think truckers or grocery store employees should get overtime.
Would any legislature deliberately create a situation in which a truck driver is _sometimes_ eligible for overtime (hauling Atari "E.T." cartridges to the landfill) and sometimes not (hauling frozen chicken to a warehouse)? What if a trucker performs both activities in the same week?
In agriculture, yeah. Around harvest season, many workers are overtime exempt. I suppose trucking produce from the farm to the processing facility may be part of that.
Maybe we can at long last update our archaic languages with parentheses for clarity?
Seriously people - antiques are overrated.
Requiem for the American Dream
If the law had been intentioned as the dairies claim, then the word should have been distributing not distribution.
This is yet another grammar rule called Parallel Structure:
Non-parallel:
-- Mary likes hiking, swimming, and to ride a bicycle.
Parallel:
-- Mary likes hiking, swimming, and bicycling.
The word distribution doesn't seem to be an item on the list as it is not an -ing word like the other items are.
If was meant to be part of the item list, then it should have been written as distributing.
In any case, the writer of this part of the law was clearly violating at least one grammar rule that leads to ambiguity.
The law is not a program,
True, I guess, it is more akin to rules defining the operating parameters of a program.
human beings aren't computers.
Yes we are, we compute things all the time, most of the time without even realising it.
English is not a programming language.
Legal English is, in a sense. You should note that a number of words have legal meanings that differ from everyday usage.
Human languages have some ambiguity and laws cannot anticipate every scenario, but that's totally okay because (a) humans [as opposed to computers] are spectacularly equipped to solve fuzzy logic problems, and (b) our legal system has a robust framework for handling these ambiguities.
It's desirable to remove ambiguity in the law where reasonable because it is more efficient than going through the court system--but there's no seg fault just because some law has some kind of ambiguity in it.
No argument here
Because we're not robots.
Now, this again is debatable, we are after all just biological machines.
No ambiguity
No lawsuit
Plain clear English
Please stop wasting our time with this because of ambiguous grammar.