To be clear, you can’t omit the comma and make it ambiguous if you simply acknowledge it’s wrong and don’t make it a confusing optional thing. The comma is more ambiguous than the ambiguity it’s trying to solve.
But I don’t think I buy your theory of it being a difference in how you picture it because, again, all of these are sentences you can and often do say out loud. Either you are constantly confused when people talk to you about more than two things or this is not a big deal unless you psyche yourself out by considering whether the omitted comma should be present.
And if there is any room for ambiguity, in speech and in writing it’s easy to resolve by simply changing the order or by adding an extra word, which is just as much effort as the comma with the advantage that it solves the open question of whether the comma should have been there.
So for instance, “I invited the strippers and also JFK and Stalin”. This is unnecessary in this example, but it has the undeniable advantage that it’s just as clear in speech as in writing.
OK, here’s another way to look at it.
Let’s say the strippers are called JFK and Stalin, for some reason.
How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.
You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.
To be clear, you can’t omit the comma and make it ambiguous if you simply acknowledge it’s wrong and don’t make it a confusing optional thing. The comma is more ambiguous than the ambiguity it’s trying to solve.
But I don’t think I buy your theory of it being a difference in how you picture it because, again, all of these are sentences you can and often do say out loud. Either you are constantly confused when people talk to you about more than two things or this is not a big deal unless you psyche yourself out by considering whether the omitted comma should be present.
And if there is any room for ambiguity, in speech and in writing it’s easy to resolve by simply changing the order or by adding an extra word, which is just as much effort as the comma with the advantage that it solves the open question of whether the comma should have been there.
So for instance, “I invited the strippers and also JFK and Stalin”. This is unnecessary in this example, but it has the undeniable advantage that it’s just as clear in speech as in writing.
OK, here’s another way to look at it.
Let’s say the strippers are called JFK and Stalin, for some reason.
How do you make that undeniably clear with no ambiguity? Give me a sentence, written with no other words in the way I did above, that is unambiguous about the names of the strippers.
You can’t. Because in a world where the comma is optional the sentence with no comma is always ambiguous. The comma solves nothing.