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I love cute and witty penguins and beautiful sunsets on the beach.

Is this the correct way to say this? Normally i'd be fine using this sentence structure, but, supposing i'm writing something formal, is it grammatically incorrect?

Dargatz
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  • An ideal candidate for the 'Oxford and' treatment. Put a comma after penguins to signal that a new sortal distinction is being made. – Leon Conrad Mar 17 '14 at 21:31
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    I can only see two 'ands'! – WS2 Mar 17 '14 at 23:59
  • In formal writing it's a mistake to characterize penguins as witty. I recommend something along the lines of "herring-breathed" instead. – Sven Yargs Mar 18 '14 at 00:14
  • @SvenYargs Or possibly berkeley-breathed. – MetaEd Mar 18 '14 at 17:46
  • @MετάEd: Ho ho—good call! I was actually at the same (45,000-student) university as Berkeley Breathed when he began the predecessor to Bloom County (which he called The Academia Waltz) in the student newspaper. As I recall, it didn't have a penguin (the only holdover character in Bloom County was Steve Dallas), but the Opus role of ultra-naive observer was occupied by a space alien or outerspace robot of some kind (Wikipedia suggests that I might be thinking of a dog character named Rabies, but that doesn't sound right to me). – Sven Yargs Mar 18 '14 at 18:07

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Using and to mark off entries in the list is ok, up to a point. Here, though, you only have two list entries and three ands:

I love (cute and witty) penguins and (beautiful) sunsets on the beach.

This is likely to confuse, so you can either drop an adjective or use commas there:

I love cute, witty penguins and beautiful sunsets on the beach.

Oldcat
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