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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.
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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I understand 8 as "packing for distribution".
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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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I don't believe it's that simple. Consider the following example I just found:
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
That sentence could be interpreted either as you love your parents AND Lady Gaga AND Humpty Dumpty. It could also be interpreted as you love your parents, and your parents are named Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty. There is a degree of ambiguity there.
Now consider this sentence:
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty."
There is no ambiguity there. Clearly the speaker is listing three separate entities.
The judge did not rule on the meaning of the sentence. Instead, he ruled on whether the sentence is ambiguous. I think most people would agree the sentence has at least a degree of ambiguity, and that the presence of an Oxford comma would have removed that ambiguity. I had a better education with regard to grammar than students in most of the schools in my area, and even I am not absolutely sure what is technically correct. I think the judge is saying the truck drivers would not have been able to enter into the contract with full knowledge of its repercussions, but for knowledge of a grammatical technicality.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The activities "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, or packing" are all activities that take place in a food processing plant. The work in such plants is often seasonal, with long hours for a short period when the harvest comes in, and so exempting such work from overtime pay makes some sense. Truckers, on the other hand typically have work year round so there is no obvious reason to exempt them from the general rule of overtime pay just based on what type of cargo they happen to be carrying. If the legislature's intent was to exempt truckers, it would likely have done so more clearly. Reading such an exemption into a law because of ambiguous punctuation would be improper.
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.
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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Skip the comma altogether and use a numbered list. Eliminates the ambiguity entirely then.
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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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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