Regarding the "Oxford comma", since we're talking about the Oxford Numismatic Society's list - rules are good but sometimes they need to be handled flexibly when the sense demands it, or when sticking too firmly to them might result in ambiguity. The examples you quote cover the ground nicely - I like what happens to this sentence when you drop the comma:

She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.
She took a photograph of her parents, the president and the vice president.

The first sentence tells me there are four people in the photo. The second sentence only two, her parents being the officials in question.

Thanks for another great year of newsletters - all the best for 2014!

May I call your attention to perhaps the most entertaining book on punctuation ever written, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

I’m an editor at Whitman Publishing, where we firmly believe in the rightness of the serial comma. Whitman’s house style largely follows the recommendations of the Chicago Manual of Style—now in its 15th edition, which appeared in 2003—because the comma prevents such ambiguous statements as this:

“I would like to thank my parents, Gandhi and Mother Teresa.”

Are the speaker’s parents in fact Gandhi and Mother Teresa? Without the serial comma, there is room for confusion.

Don Kolman noted that he would have to have an English PhD tell him to use the serial comma. Well, I’m an English PhD—and I’m saying that everyone should use it!