Something like “Foreign ministers of Italy, France set to meet blablabla”. There’s just two parties being mentioned and yet no “and”. Makes me do a double take every time.
Asking because that’s not a thing in German and I’ve only started noticing it recently but since then I’ve seen it a lot.
It’s a thing that comes from the era of printed newspapers. Every word took up valuable space and cost a lot of ink when printed on millions of papers.
If you could cut a word from a headline and still make perfect sense to readers, you did it. There were no sentences which readers couldn’t understand if you replaced all the ands with commas, so it became the standard for newspaper headlines to do so.
#Man Attacks Hampster!
Don’t know, I’m just here to state my absolute hate for the practice. Sure you don’t write “A and B and C and D”, but “A, B, C, and D”.
However, “A, B” is absolutely awful.Upvoted purely for the use of the Oxford comma.
It tends to remove ambiguity
I feel the pause of the Oxford comma when I speak. Always throws off the rhythm of a sentence when I don’t see it in text.
You made me realize this is actually pretty common in math, e.g. “Let x, y be real numbers” instead of “Let x and y be real numbers”. I imagine this comes from the infuence of notation like “Let x, y ∈ ℝ”.
