[Ads-l] Humorous Serial Comma Examples =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=94_?=Are They Genuine or Apocryphal?

[James Landau]

Here's an example that I founmd not amusing but definitely ambiguous.

Lisa Scottoline  _Mistaken Identity_  New York: HarperCollins, 1999 ISBN 0-06-018747-6, page 99

"Bennie picked her way through the clutter on the floor, unpacked files and wallpaper books, down the narrow path her computer table."

The first time I read it, I interpreted "unpacked" as a verb and then was baffled by the strange grammar that produced.  It took several readings for me to understand that "unpacked" was the beginning of an appositive referring back to "clutter" and that "down...table" modified "picked".   The key was that double-decker prepositional phrase beginning "down".  "unpacked...down" does not sound like plausible English, and if "unpacked" were a verb, there should be an "and" either before "unpacked" or after "books" to create proper parallelism for the verbs.  Also there should not be a comma before "down".

By the way, my favorite humorous example: "He loaded the car with heavy luggage, two dogs and his wife."
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James Landau
jjjrlandau at netscape.com

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