Cambridge Comma Versus Oxford Comma Is A False Debate

Intro:

There are folks that insist on using the Oxford comma.  Their main argument is perhaps best expressed with this hilarious image:

Obviously JFK and Stalin were not strippers, so the Oxford comma has saved the day.  (I contend that very few of us are in a position to say whether they were or were not strippers.  An appeal to avoid absurdity is not the same thing as proof.  But that's another rant.)

But here's the thing: these grammar fascists are relying about factors outside of grammar to validate an assertion about grammar.  If the sentence instead were "We invited the strippers, Candy, and Stripperalla" the Oxford comma is probably not what you want.

Put another (precise if perhaps less clear) way: syntactic policy should not rely upon semantic factors.

In English (and, I imagine, many other languages) context is important.  Whatever style guide you want to use for a list of items is between you and your precious heart.  Please don't impose your subjective opinion on others.  Not just because you'll alienate people who used to care about you, but because you're figuratively fighting over a shadow.  This comma business is just syntactic sugar, a space-saving convention that arises from the fact that often English operators (in this case a certain conjunction) don't have a good order of operations.

Welcome to Nerd Town:

OK, here's whatever pill Neo took that made him see the matrix.  Any list of items ending with a conjunction is actually an operation over that conjunction whose operands are delimited by commas.

Here's an example.  When you see:
    "Jake, Steve, Bill and Ted"

what that really means is:
    "Jake and Steve and Bill and Ted"

The syntactic sugar of the comma is to have the comma stand in for the conjunction.  So if you really wanted to be a syntax fascist, Oxford's conclusion demands that you not use the comma (as a stand-in for the operator) right before the operator itself.  Hydrating the implied conjunction operator into the short-hand, with the Oxford comma we get:
    "Jake and Steve and Bill and and Ted"

Surely you Oxford boosters wouldn't want to say that :)

Notice that the comma doesn't always mean "and".  It's shorthand for whatever conjunction operator you used.  The reason we argue about "and" but not "or" or "but" is because of non-trivial disambiguation rules for "and" which are not present for "or" and "but".  "and" (as a conjunction operator) does not have a clean transitive property.

WAT:

Yeah... that doesn't really sound like English.  What I mean by that is this: the syntactic meaning of "and" depends on semantic context.  "Bacon and eggs" is a collective noun that is informed by a notion of list-ness (a list operation over "and" as operator).  But that doesn't play well with other uses of "and".  Apposition is another prickly customer.  English has overloaded "and" with nuance that "or" and "but" have been able to escape.

It's not like we did it consciously.  "or" and "but" have just experienced much lower semantic nuance as the language has evolved.  "but" only accepts 2 operands, and "or" has mostly been used in its "at least one" sense, making semantic loading largely pointless.  The operation short-circuits nicely and no one has to argue over commas.

Conclusion?

Look to context to resolve your ambiguity.  The serial comma is subject to (multiple) style guides rather than a rigid syntactic rule because it's not cool to use reverse polish notation or parentheses do disambiguate appositions, collective nouns, and other non-standard thought expressions.  So either start typing like this:
    "(Steve and Mary), ((the world's tallest lady) and (the richest man in Babylon)) are coming."

or start listening with kindness :)

PS:

I knew there was another nuance I was missing: mapping.  Typically involves the word "respectively", but that convention is neither death nor taxes.  Example: Steve and Mary, King and Queen of Wordsylnania and our benefactors today.  Strictly speaking it's just an apposition, but when both halves are collective the order and mapping become much more apparent.  By the way, the Oxford comma has no place in that sentence since none of the nouns had more than 2 members.