Courtesy of JC, this Sherlock Holmes puzzler from the Futility Closet (quoted from Andrew J. Peck, “The Solitary Man-uscript,” Baker Street Journal, June 1972):
In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” Arthur Conan Doyle created an inadvertent grammatical puzzle: Who does the term “solitary cyclist” refer to?
As I wrote John, “A curious conundrum, but I find it hard to believe it exercised the minds of so many people for so long, given that the reading that turned out (ta-da!) to be correct was the obvious one, at least to me. Of course, I’m very used to the serial comma, but I don’t believe it was so unknown back in the day.” In his response, John linked to Arika Okrent’s The Best Shots Fired in the Oxford Comma Wars, which has a lot of good quotes and ends by linking to yours truly (this 2003 post). Enjoy, and feel free to comment on the Sherlock Holmes thing if you have thoughts on the matter.
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