The comma is often used to present a list of items. Here is an example from my Google Search screen this morning:
How we understand the list depends on the context; the context is provided primarily by the words that come before the list. When I read that blurb on my screen, this is how it came into my brain:
"We protect your privacy, we protect your data, and we protect put you in control. No that's not right. I think they mean 'We protect your privacy and your data, and put you in control.'"
I don't know what they mean, really, since they didn't say it clearly.
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The problem is that the context, the "We protect", as presented, applies to the whole list. That means the words "we protect" are used with each element on the list. Even the third element. That's how I got "we protect put you in control" which is obviously incorrect.
To make the correction, I changed their ONE list of THREE things to TWO lists of TWO things each. My one list is a list of things that they protect ("your privacy and your data"). My other list is things they do ("We protect [you] ... and put you in control").
Am I making a mountain of a mole hill? I don't know. Does it matter to say what you mean?
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I hope you find the title of this post objectionable.
3 comments:
I'm a little more awake now, and my post title doesn't seem so bad. So that means the Google blurb maybe isn't so bad. Still, given
We protect your clarity, your illiteracy, and write blog posts
This would be better:
We protect your clarity and your illiteracy, and write blog posts
or this:
We protect your clarity and illiteracy, and we write blog posts
Or I don't know. Writing is re-writing. If this thing wasn't already posted, I might be re-wording the title for the next two days.
The Google sentence is less confusing than other garden-path sentences of my acquaintance, but given Google’s resources, you’d think they could get it right. I like “We protect your privacy and your data, and put you in control,” along the lines of your first revision above. “We protect your.... We put you in control” sounds a little too psalm-like to me.
" sounds a little too psalm-like " I was thinking more like an advertiser's jingle.
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