It has been reported that Therese Coffey, the new health secretary, doesn’t like the Oxford comma. This just in from an operating theatre in a corner of our creaky, under-funded health service…

The monitor beeps. The surgeon pauses, then goes in, knowing this is the critical moment.

“Vital signs are good,” she says, as she reaches into the patient and plucks out the cause of discomfort. The extracted object falls with a metallic cling into the kidney-shaped bowl, where it lies like a bullet recovered from a wound.

“That’s another one of those bloody Oxford commas removed,” the surgeon says, wiping her brow.

Coffey has riled health workers with a memo telling them not to use policy wonk ‘jargon’, to remain positive and to avoid those Oxford commas.

This is the punctuation mark that goes before the last item in a list. It is deployed below with ironic slight of hand by a sub-editor on The Guardian in its report on this story.

It turns out that I am an expert on this grammatical quirk, although that had quite escaped me. If you Google “Oxford comma and Inspector Morse”, a blog of mine from January 28 2020 pops up.

That blog recalled how Morse once paused mid bloodied footstep to deliver a lecture on the importance of the Oxford comma, a lesson from the heart of his creator Colin Dexter.

Having skimmed that blog, I am not sure I still agree with myself.

Forthright in the moment, I said of the Oxford comma that it was “…a pedant’s pause, a killjoy comma, a slows-down-your sentence comma and a comma that ought to be put into a coma. I won’t be using that fussy comma…”.

A former colleague called Tony Mallett, who sadly has since died, politely heckled me, saying he found the Oxford comma useful in avoiding ambiguity while separating the final items in a list.

Recollection of that teasing interruption sent me to two good sources: Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer, and Word Perfect by Susie Dent. Both highly recommended for anyone who worries words.

Dreyer is a copy editor in the US, but the UK edition takes account of English – rather than American – English. His very useful book has the teasing subtitle: “An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style”.

Dreyer favours what he calls the ‘series comma’, sometimes called the ‘Harvard comma’ or the ‘serial comma’ (he says ‘serial’ evokes ‘killer’, “so no…”).

He writes: “Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabour the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”

His logic is this: “No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.”

Dent, meanwhile, is less strict, pointing out that this “curious punctuation mark has, in the course of its lifetime, proved more controversial than the notorious split infinitive”.

Putting her finger on the grammatical nub, she says that those who dislike the Oxford comma do so because they were taught at school “that a comma before ‘and’ is always wrong”.

Ah, yes – those ancient grammar lessons (I speak as one who sort-of learned grammar in a grammar school where Latin was still taught).

Language moves on, as we know, like those walkways at airports that carry you forwards before depositing you to stumble on to immobile ground. Language changes, and if we insist something we were taught 40 or 50 years ago is right, perhaps grammar has just rolled along.

Of course, it’s ridiculous of Therese Coffey to deliver patronising edicts on small matters of grammar when she has a health service to save. That’s if she even wants to save it, as a leading member of Liz Truss’s clueless band of neoliberal, tax-cutting, banker-benefitting Tories.

Language does indeed change. Every time I hear someone use ‘enormity’ to mean ‘enormousness’ rather than its proper, and properly stark meaning of “something perceived as bad or morally wrong”, it sets me chuntering.

But if enough people mangle a meaning, maybe there is no longer any point in complaining.

As to that fussy comma, perhaps occasionally I will pop one in.