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I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

13 Comments

  1. No wonder he has so many sad songs in his repertoire!! Either one of those men would have offered a life of misery, but BOTH of them?? Sheesh…….

  2. That is a great, great catch. Of course, if this lack of a serial comma were intentional, then I would say that I have even higher regard for Duvall as an actress than I had for him as an actor.

  3. I think what’s at play here is the ill-informed “no comma before the word ‘and’ ”

    As teachers we should be careful about the large number of factually incorrect statements we make and force upon our students.

  4. i’d like to thank my parents, ayn rand and god.

    –or so i’ve heard said. but maybe somebody
    just made that up. this one’s a keeper. ta.

  5. Ha…I’m rolling, too! I LOVE this!

    My recent headache: wonder vs. wander. I think God is playing a joke on me, because I have literally seen people write “I’m wandering who will be next…” (etc.) about seven different times in the past week. AGH!

  6. So I think I need to raise a stink here. First off, I’m glad to see people seeing a NEED for proper punctuation, and I agree with Lloyd about the Oxford comma having its purpose in these situations (unless he’s going for a reference that’s beyond me, which is often the case). But there really should be no ambiguity here. If that were a colon, we’d have quite a mess on our hands. But as is, if we’re educated enough in our language, that should be clear as day. Then again, let’s just use the Oxford comma all the time and not have to worry about this.