Main Page
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 2995 xkcd comics,
and only 6
(0%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!
Latest comic
| University Commas |
 Title text: The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively. |
Explanation
|
This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BOT COMMA - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
The Oxford comma is a comma between the second-to-last item in a list and the word and. For instance, you might write "red, white, and blue" (with the Oxford comma) or "red, white and blue" (without it). Some style guides such as The Oxford Style Manual recommend using it while others recommend against it, though even those with such a recommendation may suggest its (non-)use in situations where doing so avoids ambiguity arising from the normally recommended choice.
This comic imagines that the other commas in a list of items are not simply generic commas, but are all associated with different universities. This applies both to commas which should always be present in a list, and blatantly erroneous commas which should never be present in a list.
The sentence used, when properly punctuated, reads (with Oxford comma bracketed): "Please buy apples, mac and cheese, milk[,] and bread."
The MIT comma might be a reference to trailing commas sometimes used in programming[1], which would be associated with a highly technical university.
Transcript
|
|
This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
[A sentence is written in greyed-out text, with the commas in black and each labeled with an arrow]
Please, buy, apples, mac, and, cheese, milk, and, bread,.
[The labels are as follows, in order:]
Harvard comma Yale comma Stanford comma Columbia comma Cambridge comma Cornell comma Oxford comma Princeton comma MIT comma
Caption: The Oxford one is the most famous, but many major universities have their own comma.
Is this out of date? .
New here?
Last 7 days (Top 10) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.
- If you're new to wiki editing, see the explain xkcd:Editor FAQ for a specific guidance to this Wiki and the more general help on how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.
- Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.
- You can browse the comics from List of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.
- There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!
Rules
Don't be a jerk!
There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.
If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.
Please only submit material directly related to (and helping everyone better understand) xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.
If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.
