>>8228917
it removes hilarious ambiguity

Those at the ceremony were the commodore, the fleet captain, the donor of the cup, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones

inb4 who gives a fuck about

>>8228917
saves ink

>>8228923
poorly written sentence tbqh, i see that used as an example a lot but surely it's just bad writing

this example is from a tumblr thing that gets passed around but it's the best one for the comma I've come across—but you could take this tack >>8228922
and deliberately not use it to allow for these kinds of goofy (mis)readings

We invited the strippers, Stalin and Lenin.

vs.

We invited the strippers, Stalin, and Lenin.

>>8229928
>tumblr
>Stalin and Lenin

>>8228923
What's wrong there? Sorry, foreign speaker.

>>8230147
There's a cup named Mr. Smith in it.

>>8228922
There is ambiguity in either case depending on how the sentence is phrased.

>>8230176
Not really, you'd have to have some serious issues understanding context to think the cup is named Mr. Smith from that sentence. The real ambiguity is whether you're listing people including a Mr. Smith and a person who donated the cup, or if you're specifying that Mr. Smith donated the cup.

>>8230279
In any case I would assume it's the first of those, as you already labeled others by other than name, and so why would the donor of the cup be any different? You could use other grammar in order to specify the name of the donor in the list.

tl;dr - no arguments against the oxford comma exist

al non-users of the oxford comma are nonhuman subplebs

>>8228917
the only reason people don't use it these days is that they were taught that way.

>>8228923
not using oxford comma doesn't eliminate the ambiguity. using the oxford comma can eliminate ambiguity, like these examples >>8229928. I've never seen a case where not using it eliminates ambiguity.

over the past couple centuries, journalists somehow became respected authorities on the "proper" way to use language. it would be one thing if they ever came up with anything that made sense, but instead we got a bunch of goofy personal opinions and pet peeves from guys like george orwell, william safire, and strunk & white. somewhere in there I'm pretty sure people decided they'd save some ink and a little bit of space by not using a comma before the last item in a list. apparently they didn't think too hard about it, because it can introduce unnecessary ambiguity.