I'm not sure I understand what is meant by the reference to "wordgames." Linguists work with ambiguous constructions all the time in an effort to better understand the structure of language ("I fired guns with zebras" vs. "I fired guns with zebras," where the first refers to guns with zebras painted on them and the second refers to going out on the shooting range with a bunch of my zebra friends). I definitely think they're wordgames in the sense that they're fun, but I disagree that this example, the Oxford comma, etc. don't shed light on the structure of language (though they may not shed light on "language and meaning," which may be a different endeavor).

Andrew's first construction was: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Syntactically, that's "To my parents, (who are) Ayn Rand and God."

Amanda's original construction was: "To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God." The ambiguity stems from the different syntactic readings of:

"To my mother, (to) Ayn Rand, and (to) God,"

vs.

"To my mother, (who is) Ayn Rand, and (to) God."

I haven't taken enough linguistics to do any sort of meaningful analysis. But, most likely, some of the above constructions are grammatical in English, but not in other languages. Maybe in some languages, the clause "To X" simply can't govern anything outside the same clause, so that the construction "To X and Y" wouldn't be grammatical (because it wouldn't admit of the reading "To X and (to) Y."

In a language like that, the construction "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God" wouldn't be ambiguous (and hence wouldn't admit of any comma issues), because there would be only one grammatical reading: "To my parents, (who are) Ayn Rand and God."

The above analysis may be linguistically wrong, but it's an example of the types of deeper things you could do with "wordgames."

I hope no one takes this post as anything more than it is, which is just an expression of how much I like playing around with language, and my conviction that wordplay and language-play is anything but frivolous.

Anyway, for those looking for a diversion, I've always liked this one:

A reporter for a sensationalist early 20th-century newspaper walks through a grocery, whereupon he hears a great crash in Aisle 12, due to a customer knocking over an entire section of products. The next day, the headline in the paper reads:

"Stocks Plummet in Market Crash."

-- MichaelBerkovits - 25 May 2008