Birmingham, Vietnam

If you were raised in the 1950s or 1960s, and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child.

I was thinking, hey, Birmingham is not in Vietnam. Then I realized that what the writer meant to say was

If you were raised in the 1950s or 1960s, and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam, and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child.

Yes, the Oxford comma comes to the rescue.

Semicolon and Other Punctuation Notes

I hardly ever feel the need to use a semicolon. I think this particular punctuation mark muddies the page (visually) and obscures the relation between ideas. You can get by pretty well with periods and commas, with colons used to introduce quotes. The semicolon is used only to connect two short sentences that really can't stand on their own, or to separate items on a list when these items are phrases with interior commas rather than single words. In the first case, I just write two separate sentences. If they are choppy, then I recast one of them, or combine them into a single sentence.

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I reviewed an article the other day for a nameless journal. The article was written in Spanish and the author had the most annoying habit of separating the subject and the verb of a sentence with a comma. Writers of Spanish do this sometimes when the subject is a longer one, but it is not correct usage.

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You usually don't need a comma after thus or and at the beginning of a sentence.