English teachers, rejoice! The Oxford Comma is still with us!

Yesterday, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the apparent decision by the University of Oxford to eliminate the Oxford comma (the one used at the end of a series) for good. Relax, keepers of the Queen's English. It's still part of their official style guide. Why is the Oxford comma so important? Here's an explanation from NPR's Monkey See blog, where a bachelorette is making a tough choice:

Without the serial comma, she might say: "The best available men are the two tall guys, George and Pete." There, you really don't know whether George and Pete are the tall guys, or whether there are two tall guys in addition to George and Pete. You literally don't know how many men you're talking about, and while that level of confusion as to elementary facts seems like something that might actuallyhappen on The Bachelorette, it is unfortunate in other settings. If, on the other hand, you use the serial comma, then you would write that sentence only if you meant that George and Pete were the tall guys, and if you didn't, you'd say, "I met two tall guys, George, and Pete."