I'm a Neon Fogarty.

In this week, I have a news story about a missing comma that cost a company $10 million

and a meeting middle about the difference between compared to and compared with.

Let's get started.

People have such strong opinions about the Oxford comma that in 2013, the satire cited

the onion published an article titled,

Four Copy Editors Killed in ongoing AP style Chicago Manual Gang Violence,

which ended lamenting an innocent bystander who committed suicide after being,

quote, caught up in a long-winded dispute over the use of the cereal or Oxford comma, unquote.

But that little comma before the end in a series such as red, white, and blue

is no joke for contract lawyers.

Last week, news broke that the O'Courst dairy in the state of Maine would have to pay

its milk truck drivers approximately $10 million because of a missing cereal comma

in Maine's overtime law.

In this class action case, the two sides were arguing about the duties employees do

for which they don't get overtime pay.

This is the ambiguous sentence that describes the exemptions.

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing,

drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of one agricultural

produce, two meat and fish products, and three perishable goods.

The drivers do distribute perishable goods, milk, but the important part is that there

is no comma after the word shipment in the phrase packaging for shipment or distribution.

...