Grammarians have been twisting themselves up in recent days, due to a report that the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is being scrapped. Seems it was a mistake, an error, and a miscommunication. The distinctive comma, which precedes the word "and," is sometimes used to help clarify the meaning of a sentence. At The Baltimore Sun, which uses AP style, the serial comma is not favored. But having an Oxford pedigree has helped the special comma endure.

As Linda Holmes of NPR noted about the controversy, the folks at the University of Oxford "haven't changed their authoritative style guide, but they've changed their internal PR department procedures that they use for press releases. The PR department and the editorial department are two different things, so this doesn't necessarily mean much of anything, except that it's maybe a little embarrassing to have your own PR department abandoning your style guide."

I'm not one to get excited over punctuation, though it is often the topic of dinner conversation with my wife, a Strict Constructionist Grammarian who often spots tyops and other problems on Read Street. (That one's for you.) I did invent a significant punctuation mark -- the Fini -- but it has not caught on. Neither has Patrick's Tentative Hyphen. So relax, folks. The Oxford comma endures -- and probably will as long as there is an England.