Attorneys deal with laws for a living. Bureaucrats work with regulations. Restaurateurs contend with heat, spice and the irregularity of natural ingredients. I work with words and, occasionally, ...

If you’re looking for a grammatical convention guaranteed to spark an unnecessarily outraged debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [Editor’s note: I don’t know that I’d call it unnecessary].

That was the subject line of an email the Associated Press Stylebook editors recently sent to subscribers. To anyone who’s been on the frontlines of the comma wars, the message seemed like an olive ...