Via DCist, I find a City Paper editor complaining that he “hates” the serial comma, which is house style at CP, for what strikes me as a truly bizarre reason:

My argument against the comma is simple: It’s ungrammatical. Here at the copy desk, we hunt down and fix phrases such as “I ate tuna, and crackers for lunch” or “I came for lunch, but stayed for dinner.” In both instances the final clause refers to the same subject as the first; they are properly cast, respectively, “I ate tuna and crackers for lunch” and “I came for lunch but stayed for dinner.”

But the serial comma ignores this inconvenient fact. If you have three things for lunch, you magically don’t have to obey the rules of grammar! Now you can say, “I ate a can of tuna, some sweet corn, and crackers for lunch,” or “I came for lunch, got drunk, and stayed for dinner.”

This is badly misguided. The rules of grammar are not like the rules of, say, predicate logic or mathematics, where some kind of rigorous consistency in the use of symbols across contexts is required. A convention specifying the use of a serial comma does not “magically” exempt you from the rules of grammar; the rules of grammar just are conventions of that sort. It’s like saying irregular verbs are “magically exempt” from the rules of conjugation—which would actually be closer to something sensible, since there are perfectly sound clarity grounds for using the serial comma (which the editor mentions), whereas nothing equally compelling justifies the fact that “held” rather than “holded” is the past tense of “hold.” And the serial comma convention basically [ahem] holds everywhere else but in newspapers, where I’d understood its omission as motivated by a desire to save precious column inches, not some deep grammatical concerns. Anyway, the reason for treating the two-term series and the three-term series differently is obvious enough. If you see “I had tuna, and crackers…” you’re set up by the comma to expect an independent clause with “crackers” as its subject. (“…and crackers would have really hit the spot!”) It would be needlessly confusing to include a comma there, since it’s helpful for comprehension to have the comma before the conjunction prepare you for a new subject. But there’s no such danger with a series, because nobody is going to write: “I had tuna, carrots, and crackers would have really hit the spot.” The convention of having an “and” signal the end of a series lets you know to expect further items if you’ve seen a list start and haven’t hit that “and” yet. So the rationale for the rule prohibiting the comma before the “and” in a two-term series just doesn’t apply: You already know you’re not launching into an independent clause. For teaching me all I know about grammar and punctuation, I’d like to thank my parents, bell hooks and e. e. cummings.