Periods after abbreviations

[David Bowie]

From:    Damien Hall halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU

<snip>

: ...It's also an absolute rule of British
: prescriptive grammar (though clearly 'prescriptive' may be a four-letter
: word on this listserv - perhaps we should all add it to our lists of
: words to be filtered out by spam filters, replacing 'fuck' in that list)
: that, in lists, the penultimate item never has a comma after it if there
: is also an 'and', whereas I note that in America all items in such lists
: are followed by commas...

Not true--i was explicitly taught (in the US), and have seen in usage
manuals, that the commas in such circumstances are optional, and it doesn't
matter which you use as long as you're consistent (though the Chicago Manual
prefers inclusion of the comma, with the stated reason being to avoid the
risk of ambiguity).

<snip>

David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
    Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
    house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
    chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.