Don't look at me. I just got my copy to see if it was as dry as I remembered.
I'm not going to do another long-winded essay on exactly why the Oxford comma is logically and linguistically unnecessary; the usual example-arguments "for" it (e.g., "I would like to thank my parents, God and the pope") are based on silly reductio ad absurdum that could be easily remedied with even the slightest sliver of thought (also e.g., "I would like to thank my God, my parents and the pope" or "I would like to thank my parents, as well as God and the pope", as opposed to "I would like to thank my parents: God and the pope", which is the way it should be done if the silly meaning were, in fact, the case).
Oh, and as for the above placement of the comma outside the quotation marks? Another situation in which English suffers from a severe case of rectocranial inversion.
Yet I still stand by S & W... as a beginning. Once you've
learned the rules, you can bend and break them logically.
