In the recent documentary by Roddenberry's son he interviews Berman about how the series changed when he took over. No mention of the Darmok episode, but I found it interesting how Berman felt he was the "guardian of the mythology" (his words) and sought to maintain the internal consistency Roddenberry was always so adamant about. IMHO, he did a great job with that aspect of his productions. Berman's cameos by original cast members during several episodes of Next Generation did a lot for continuity. Had a hard time with the balding Patrick Stewart "replacing" Shatner, but his character quickly grew on me.

That documentary ends with an interview of J.J. Abrams on the new cast, and whether he was trying to achieve that same consistency. Roddenberry showed Abrams a video his father had made, where he talks about exactly that type of thing, admitting that if the "show must go on" he hopes future producers and writers will follow his tradition. Haven't seen Into Darkness yet, but in Star Trek (2009) I thought Abrams did an outstanding job, both in casting and plot line. Thought the choice of making "dark matter" a red liquid was a poor decision, but that was probably done by the special effects people.

Of course, since both these movies were prequels, he didn't have much choice in terms of internal consistency. The romantic involvement between Spock and Uhuru was a bit of a stretch for me, but I guess Abrams is entitled to some artistic license.

I was indeed out of town, doing the live events in Dallas.

By the way, there is a solution to the wrong names showing when you come back to the forum and are not logged in. But it means turning off caching on the forum, which will likely slow things down. I'm looking into it further.

The more recent sentence being discussed, "A safe, stable, and garage are all means to keep one's possessions secure", is not ambiguous at all because the list does not end with an adjective modifying a noun, it ends simply with a noun demanding that stable be a noun. If the comma after safe were gone, it would have a different meaning, "a secure animal shelter along with a garage." But the comma is there and in this case the comma makes safe a noun so there is a list of nouns.

If you moved the conjunction, and, you could also change the meaning as well as make it ambiguous. "A safe and stable garage are means to keep one's possessions secure"  No comma is called for with either meaning but it is unclear whether the sentence means two nouns with the second one being modified or a list of two modifiers in front of only one noun. (note that I removed the word all  because that would have helped clarify the sentence. Come to think of it, the word all  in the original sentence lends one to believe that there are three nouns. If you remove the comma from after safe, making only two nouns, all should have been replaced by both or else eliminated.

Other research found that producer Rick Berman at first didn't like the script ... thought it was too esoteric with not enough action. His writers persisted, and it went on in a slightly modified form. Later, Berman was quoted as saying it was one of his favorite episodes ever.

Berman, his eyes opened!

Glenn said: OK. I acknowledge an objection on the basis of ambiguity and expectation. But that is the spring from which the humor flows! Language is ambiguous.

I totally agree, and really enjoy that type of word play. I guess my bias is driven by the fact that most of my writing is technical and tries to avoid ambiguity. But I'll add one more paraprosdokian to your list, also by Groucho, and one of my all-time favorites:

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

And here's one of my own, which is kind of a rip off or Dorothy Parker's, but I wrote it back in the 70s when I did a humor column for my college newspaper:

If you took all the people in China and laid them end to end, they'd be a helluva lot more comfortable.

"If I am reading this graph correctly, I'd be very surprised." Stephen Colbert
"You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else." Winston Churchill
"On his feet he wore blisters." Aristotle
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." Groucho Marx
"I sleep eight hours a day and at least ten at night." Bill Hicks
"I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." Will Rogers
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." Einstein
"Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution." Mae West

[edit: added the following}
As a lovely bookend to the Colbert paraprosdokian:
“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.” Dorothy Parker, as recorded in While Rome Burns

I was taught to use the articles "a" "an" "the" (and the serial comma) as needed to remove potential ambiguities. I think that's where RobertB is coming from. If no ambiguity exists, then the punctuation advocated by Glenn works just fine. Concise and efficient writing/speaking is almost always better when it can be done without introducing ambiguities.

Have either of you read the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss?

Here's the entry in online Merriam-Webster, which lists the noun definitions first:
Stable

The Corpus of Contemporary American provides lots of examples of common noun series with elisions of either the or a. To name a few of the many, many:
... a knife, fork, and spoon ...
... a man, woman, and child ...
... a ball, bat, and glove ...
... a suit, shirt, and tie ...
... a beginning, middle, and end ...
... a computer, printer, and scanner ...
... a father, mother, and daughter ...
... a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom ...
... the blood, sweat, and tears ...
... the sights, sounds, and smells ...
... the women, infants, and children ...
... the life, death, and resurrection ...
... the mind, body and spirit ...
... the art, science, and practice ...
... the names, addresses, and phone numbers ...
... the days, weeks, and months ...

RobertB said

If you mean a stable (n) with no danger, the comma is wrong.  If the comma is present they must be two nouns.

Anyway, it struck me as I was making my way through chapter two of the new book that while he's talking about words that encapsulate metaphors we no longer think of consciously until we try to explain them to someone less familiar with the language, that Darmak and Jalad would have been a great reference for him to make. Checked the index, though: nothing.

Glenn said: My favorite cultural reference example in English is not an idiom but would have nearly universal meaning: she was Juliet on her balcony.

Heimhenge, his eyes opened!

My favorite cultural reference example in English is not an idiom but would have nearly universal meaning: she was Juliet on her balcony.

I'm not sure about the language with the most metaphors, but Chinese has to be up there. Many common words are highly metaphoric: the word for "thing" consists of the two characters for east and west.

Chinese is loaded chock full of these infernal four-character phrases. Encountering a new one, I would recognize or look up each word, and still have no whit of an idea what it meant. One fairly easy one was "play guitar in front of a cow". Ie. "casting pearls before swine". They are loaded with cultural references.