UrbanUpdate

“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”

Vampire Weekend posed that question in the opening line of the song “Oxford Comma,” from their 2008 debut album. Eleven years later, everyone on the internet seems to give a fuck—many fucks, a veritable shit-ton of fucks—about the punctuation mark. T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with “team Oxford comma” get thousands of five-star reviews on Etsy. BuzzFeed has published listicles about the Oxford comma. On Twitter, where people gnash teeth over “correct” grammar and storm the President’s mentions with punctuational pitchforks, an anthropomorphized Oxford comma sporting a top hat and handlebar mustache has nearly 25,000 followers.

On an internet occupied by as many finger-wagging “grammar Nazis” as slovenly texters who prefer emoji to verbal displays of emotion, the Oxford comma has become a cause célèbre. This is especially true on dating apps, where many users have deemed the punctuation mark something they “can’t live without”—a designation that’s put it in the same lofty category as cheese, the beach, and Game of Thrones.

Also known as the serial comma, the Oxford comma is the one that goes before “and” (or “or”) in a list of three or more things: “The American flag is red, white, and blue.” Fans of the Oxford comma think it prevents ambiguity. “I believe that it just makes things clear,” said Mary Norris, who for three decades was the “comma queen” of The New Yorker’s copy department. Benjamin Dreyer, the longtime copy chief of Random House, calls those who eschew the Oxford comma “godless savages.” He writes in his new book, “No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.” Like, for instance, the memorably illustrated sentence “We invited the strippers, J.F.K. and Stalin.” With no Oxford comma, it implies that the performers share their names with the 35th U.S. president and a Soviet dictator, or that J.F.K. and Stalin were, in fact, pasty-wearing strippers all along.

Even with language luminaries like Norris and Dreyer on the side of the Oxford comma, the punctuation mark has its critics. Some people argue that it’s unnecessary, redundant, and superfluous. Business Insider called it “extremely overrated.” In the old days of typesetting, print media outlets omitted the Oxford comma to save time and effort. On the infinite blank page of the internet, most newspapers still omit the Oxford comma, in accordance with AP style. (Most magazines, including this one, use it.)

Recently, the Oxford comma has found a spot on the Bingo card of online-dating profiles, alongside mainstays like “no hookups,” “no drama,” and “420 friendly.” Whether you’re mindlessly grazing on Tinder or Bumble, OkCupid or Match.com, you’re now as likely to learn someone’s thoughts on the Oxford comma as you are their job title or their penchant for tacos. On the Tinder subreddit, which has 1.8 million subscribers, one user lamented that the Oxford comma features in “like a quarter of bios ’round my parts.” Another said, “It’s everywhere.” Even a journal entry on Tinder’s own blog mentions it: “Honestly, I’m not sure how compatible I can be with someone who is anti-the Oxford comma.”

To date in the 21st century is to endlessly encounter the same recycled phrases, clichés, and “interests,” in a kind of algorithmically curated romantic groupthink. Pizza. Netflix. “Fluent in sarcasm.” Quote from The Office. “I only swiped right for your dog.” Dog emoji. Clinking-beers emoji. “Love having fun with friends and family.” (Wait, let me guess—you also “love to laugh”?) There’s a reason that online-dating tropes have long been the butt of Twitter jokes, millennial comedians’ stand-up bits, and satirical articles on the humor site McSweeney’s: Few people’s profiles do them any favors. When the bone-dry online-dating landscape is littered by so many useless, unspecific tumbleweeds of personality, why, then, is something as peculiarly niche as a punctuation mark popping up so often? Why does anyone need their potential hookup to know that they’re a “defender of the Oxford comma”?

The blue-blood punctuation mark, named after the Oxford University Press, acts as a social signifier, a sieve for the bookish and studious (and, perhaps, pretentious). It suggests personality traits that extend far beyond punctuation preferences. There are other ways of doing this in your Tinder profile, of course. You could name Infinite Jest as your favorite book, as so many men apparently do, but that has all the subtlety of dropping the 1,000-page tome on your potential match’s head. You could say your favorite movies—sorry, films—are by Wes Anderson and David Lynch, but then you’d look like a cut-and-paste film student from a starter-pack meme. Oh, you’re a “world traveler” and you “love to explore the city”? Please, tell me more about your voyages to—gasp—Paris and your offbeat bar-hopping adventures in—checks notes—Bushwick.

Although Norris admitted to not having tried online dating, she recognizes what the Oxford comma represents. “I think it suggests care. It suggests somebody who’s structured and disciplined and not a slob,” she said. “Somebody who’s into detail, who likes precision. Somebody who has standards.” If a person has high standards for the written word, presumably they’ll have high standards outside iMessage, too. “A lot of prose and punctuation and how you present yourself in writing is really a kind of intellectual version of clothing,” Norris said. “Maybe the serial comma is kind of like a bow tie or a button-down collar. Something that’s neat and structural in appearance.” It signals “someone who knows what she wants.”

What many people want, evidently, are word nerds and grammar geeks. Ethan, a student in business school, said that when he was active on dating apps, he immediately swiped right on guys who mentioned the Oxford comma. “Sometimes it just takes a comma,” he said. Ethan thinks it shows “a certain level of erudition. But also [of] passion. If you care about Oxford commas, you really care, so that’s good to be up front about.”

Sara, who works in television in Los Angeles, told me that the usual suspect is “always some hipster dude who isn’t posting shirtless ab pics, so they need something to set themselves apart.” They’re hoping to come off as “smart and cute” by mentioning the Oxford comma, she said. “And, unfortunately, it sometimes works. Because I love an Oxford comma!”

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Dean, a New York-based lawyer, said that it’s “always at the end of a list like ‘dog mom, shower singer, Oxford comma enthusiast.’ So kind of cleverly self-referential. That’s probably the message: Hey, I’m clever, I’m someone you can banter with.”

Besides, as Ethan pointed out, “Calling yourself a ‘grammar Nazi’ can be icky.” It hints that you’re annoyingly pedantic, on the level of correcting text-message grammar. And having the word “Nazi” in your Tinder profile can be viscerally jarring. The Oxford comma, meanwhile, is “such a niche debate” that being a vocal supporter puts you in an “even more exclusive club” than being a grammar Nazi, Ethan said.

The Oxford comma is a stylistic choice, unburdened by moral designations of right or wrong. Yet on Twitter, Reddit, and other bastions of civil discourse on romance, netizens are displeased with a pretentious little punctuation mark taking over their dating apps. An editor at NPR, Danny Nett, got 6,000 likes for tweeting, “There are a lot of genuinely awful things about dating in D.C., but by far the worst is people declaring themselves ‘Oxford comma enthusiast’ in Tinder bios.” The editor-in-chief of Engadget, Dana Wollman, tweeted, “All of the men on Brooklyn Tinder are in open relationships and list the Oxford comma as an interest.” On the Tinder and OkCupid subreddits, the Oxford comma is the frequent subject of posts with a tenor of suspicious bafflement. Is it a white-people thing? A gay thing? A code word for butt stuff? “It’s just some dumb basic shit that people put in their profile so they can seem intellectual,” one cynical redditor said. “It’s as bad as ‘live, laugh, love.’”

I read to Norris a popular tweet, from the screenwriter Elizabeth Hackett: “Passion for the Oxford comma isn’t a substitute for a personality.” Norris cackled in response. “It sounds kind of like a backlash against the Oxford comma,” she said. “It almost seems inevitable, now that you come to think of it. There’s a backlash against everything eventually.” Not even a punctuation mark is immune to being Milkshake Duck’d.

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