I've been a technical writer and editor in my time, although never as my sole job title, and I generally do use the Oxford Comma in my writing - except for those situations where I don't, of course. But if I may put my editor's hat on for a moment, I have to agree with Mr Pullman... my problem with the coin text is that, as written, it encourages a nonsensical parse. Here's the text:
- "Peace, Prosperity and Friendship with all Nations"
This looks fine, because you sort of know what it's trying to say, but it's ambiguous. The problem is that the inscription mimics a very common structure in English sentences, where a list of nouns form the subject of the sentence, and rest of the sentence is considered to apply equally to each of them, such as:
- "Oats, nuts and bran in our cereals"
"Oats, Nuts and Bran" forms the subject, and "in our cereals" is the common tail (yeah there's no verb; neither is there one on the coin). Expanded, that's "Oats in our cereals, nuts in our cereals and bran in our cereals".
Because the coin inscription's structure appears to follow this pattern, it tempts you to make the same expansion. But if you do that, you get:
- "Peace with all Nations, Prosperity with all Nations and Friendship with all Nations".
.. well, as that bloody song says, two out of three ain't bad: nobody with fluent English would ever wish a country "Prosperity
with all Nations".
But now, put in the Oxford comma, and the message becomes:
- "Peace, Prosperity, and Friendship with all Nations."
..and now it's clear we're not dealing with a group subject, but instead wishing for three separate things: "Peace", "Prosperity" and "Friendship with all Nations". All lovely sentiments, all expressed clearly.
Okay, I've put far too much thought into this now, I know... but it was only ten minutes or so, and I would have hoped that before striking twenty million coins with the text on it, someone with a solid grasp of English would check it.
I'm completely with you on this. If the person doesn't know enough, or care enough, to make at least an attempt at basic structure and punctuation, I've come to learn that their outpourings can usually be safely ignored.
It's just too damn difficult to read something like that and the chances that you'll misconstrue something are correspondingly higher, so given that there is usually no shortage of content vying for my attention, I just move swiftly on.
Long, dense, rambling paragraphs like that are also a sign that the writer hasn't properly organised their own thoughts, so you're doubly wasting your time. Even if you put the effort into understanding what's written, there's a fair chance that what you end up with was not what the writer meant to say in the first place, or worse something that manages to contradict itself, leaving nobody any the wiser.