> with sometimes disastrous results

There are other language like French without the Oxford comma and that does not lead to disastrous misunderstandings.

It is not like the English language, in general, does not have plenty of room for misinterpretation, even in every day speech. However if you look at the level of precision people need the Oxford coma for, you would have the impression you are in a project coin discussion for a small tweak in the java language causing compiler warnings.