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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 18 2017, @12:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-take-'Grammar-Nazi'-for-$10,000,000-Alex-... dept.

A company that refused to pay its delivery drivers overtime for years has lost its bid to be a cheapskate, to the tune of $10,000,000. The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals (decision-pdf) interpreted an exception to OT laws with special care to a meaningful but missing comma. Specifically, the phrase existing in the statute is:
"..., packing for shipment or distribution of:"

The company wanted the phrase to be interpreted as:
"..., packing for shipment, or distribution of:"

Without the comma, the activity excluded from coverage is "packing". With the comma present, it would have excluded packing or distribution.

The law as it exists in all its commaless glory:

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:55PM (#480895)

    I think he's suggesting that "the stripper, JFK, and Stalin" could be read with JFK as a parenthetical, as "the stripper (JFK) and Stalin"; technically true, but you didn't see the ambiguity, and I had to hunt for it, because that isn't how any sane person would write it. We have three commonly used parenthetical delimiters, and even though the main function is to distinguish how directly related the parenthetical is, you obviously don't pick the one that will create ambiguity.

    The whole problem with the Oxford comma is not the technical ambiguity either with or without, but that we can't implicitly resolve the ambiguity with "but nobody would" arguments. The possibility of a "comma-delimited parenthetical in a comma-separated list" construction technically creates ambiguity, but is not a problem because we don't have a significant fraction of writers who would ever write that way.

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