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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.
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?
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
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.
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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The State of Maine states that the Oxford comma should *never* be used in Maine legislation. This means the second(last) item after a comma in a list should be considered a separate item, based on the legislative drafting manual. I don't see how the court could ignore this.
https://www.maine.gov/legis/ro...
"A. Series. Although authorities on punctuation may differ, when drafting Maine law or
rules, don’t use a comma between the penultimate and the last item of a series.
Do not write:
Trailers, semitrailers, and pole trailers
Write:
Trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers
Be careful if an item in the series is modified. For example:
Trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers of 3,000 pounds gross weight or less
are exempt from the licensing provisions.
Does the 3,000-pound limit apply to trailers and semitrailers or only to pole trailers? If the
limit is not intended to apply to trailers and semitrailers, the provision should read:
Pole trailers of 3,000 pounds gross weight or less, trailers and semitrailers
are exempt from the licensing provisions.
If the limit is intended to apply to all three, the provision should read:
If a trailer, semitrailer or pole trailer has a gross weight of 3,000 pounds or
less, it is not required to be licensed."
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
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 problem here is that this is a company document, not Maine Legislation. So he coding style likely doesn't apply.
It's clearly not because they're a single item, or the previous item in the list would have had "or" instead of a comma.
If the intent had been that this was one item, the law would have said "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."
Much as I want to side with the truckers on this one, no they're not right. In American English, it's quite clear that the two items were meant to be separate and no comma is required before the last conjunction.
I personally think it's bullshit that Maine has decided to carve out an exception to overtime laws for one specific interest group (no doubt one that regularly brib....ahem...."donates to the campaigns of" state political officials). I also think such obvious interest-group exceptions should be against Federal law, if it's not already. But hanging their hat on a comma that's not required in American English is a weak-as-fuck way to go about getting the overtime that they really do deserve.
BTW, if they drive any of this dairy out of state, they would fall under Federal trucking regulations, which don't provide for overtime at all (only 10-hour rest breaks for every 11 hours of driving and 70-hour-week limits). That's bullshit too.
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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.
Having worked in this industry (specifically shipping food goods) shipment and distribution are one and the same thing. Learn 2 Logistics, Maine. Better yet, Maine needs to go the fuck back to school and remember what the definitions of those two words are.
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Not only is there ambiguity, but as shipment and distribution are similar and related ideas, it is quite likely that a reasonable person would tend to resolve the ambiguity as "The packing for (shipment or distribution) of..." by assuming that "shipment or distribution" describes the general category of moving product.
Since there is clear ambiguity in this contract, and a reasonable person could come to the same conclusion that the truckers did, by the doctrine of Contra proferentem said truckers most certainly do have a case.
The sentence is ungrammatical otherwise. It says "A, B, C or D". If we assume "C or D" is meant as one item in they list, there is a missing conjunction ("and" or "or", in this case) before it. The only reasonable way to read it is that C and D are separate 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.
I don't think they did ignore it. The fact that the Oxford comma is banned doesn't change the fact that the clause in question is ambiguously written. Had the law been written with bullet points, for example, the ambiguity would be resolved. But absent that, the court had to look at other clues in the text. What the defendants argued was that the other exempted activities were all in gerund form, whereas it uses "distribution" instead of "distributing". Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that "distribution" modifies "packing" in the same was that "shipment" does, rather than being a separate item.
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.
Alternately (as the court found), one could plausibly interpret that because the other exempted activities are all in gerund form, while using "distribution" instead of "distributing", that it is reasonable to assume that "distribution" modifies "packing" in the same was that "shipment" does, rather than being a separate item.
"shipment and distribution are one and the same thing."
No, they're not. Trucking goods from a manufacturer's plant to their own warehouse is shipping, but not distribution in a legal sense. Distribution occurs when there's a change of hands. At a roadside farm stand, there's distribution, but no shipping.
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Comprehension fail.
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Skip the comma altogether and use a numbered list. Eliminates the ambiguity entirely then.
Except that now we have "-ing" words in a sequence with a "-tion" word, and that has to be considered. There's two different grammatical indicators pointing in two different ways. The law is ambiguous.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
i think this just shows why laws shouldn't be written in English. Laws should have their own syntax including special delimiters to clarify items in a list. It should be designed sort of like a programming language.
comas clearly aren't sufficient.
Commas are sufficient, but the lack of an Oxford comma should always been seen as grammatically incorrect, and whomever wrote the Maine law needs to not be able to write laws concerning grammar anymore.
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."
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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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First of all, I'll agree with you.
However, at the very least, this could have been easily solved by using a bulleted list instead of writing it out in a sentence. Non-standard syntax is not necessary in this particular case.
Second, law-making bodies (and the general public, as they ought to be able to access the law conveniently too) need better software tools for dealing with legislation. For example, they need better version-control -- I'm involved with local government, and getting a diff-like representation of the proposed changes to a law is way more of a pain in the ass than it should be. Another issue is that laws are structured like computer code, with external references, but there needs to be a better way to "inline" the other clauses being referenced so that it's easier to see the whole law without having to jump around and reference multiple sources. Finally, lawmakers need to be introduced to the concepts of "refactoring," "technical debt" and "removing unused code."
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