we're on an assignment from god

part one: I am embarking on a project and/or quest. A document I'm working on at work drove me around the twist this afternoon, and I announced on Facebook that I'm going on a quest to eliminate "and/or". BECAUSE IT MEANS "OR". It looks sloppy and adds no meaning. I delete "and/" every time I see it (unless it's appropriate to delete "/or", of course, but that's rare), and am prepared to go seven rounds with whatever analyst or project manager wants to argue with me that it should go back in. GAH. This job is not helpful if what you want to eliminate is your tendency to obsess over pet peeves.

part two: I am not embarking on other kinds of journey. My first instinct, when I went on Facebook to rant about "and/or", was to announce that I was going on a crusade against it. Naturally I decided not to use that word, because unpleasant implications. The next option that occurred to me was jihad. No better. (The very first person to "like" my post was a former co-worker who happens to be Muslim—from Pakistan—so I had immediate reason to be even gladder I'd avoided both those terms.)

part three: Conflation. A dude I know from curling commented that he'd join my team opposing "and/or" if I would work to bring back the Oxford comma. Of course I had to insist that IT HASN'T GONE ANYWHERE. And then as I was walking home from work it occurred to me that another thing I'm not on vis-a-vis "and/or" is a mission. But who was on a mission? The Blues Brothers. And what else did they say? "It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." I mean [apart from the coordination of unlike categories or failure of parallel structure—there should actually be an "and" rather than a comma after "gas", but never mind], I can hear the Oxford comma in that. Can't you?

HIT IT.