The Comma
I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed a few changes in the way that my fellow Americans use and abuse the English language. My [favorite] is the frequent use of the word less instead of fewer. It may be that people have always made this mistake, but I insist that it has become far more pervasive at every level of society. News personalities and print journalists will confuse them as naturally as the person who makes the “Ten Items or Less” sign at the grocery store express lane. Maybe people use less when they mean fewer because it is a linguistic example of English evolutionarily suppressing its inflectedness. I don’t know the term for that phenomenon, but isn’t the choice between less and fewer an example of changing a phoneme to suit the context? (The context being the reference to either amounts and degrees or to a number.) I don’t know. Is that akin to inflection?
But as important as making the distinction between the uses of less and fewer may be, there is a worse example that I think poses an actual problem for clarity: the loss of the comma in written forms of address. That’s the vocative mood? Maybe it’s the imperative. In any event, you simply have to use a comma when you’re addressing someone by name. If you don’t, it’s confusing. Now, I’m no great expert in punctuation. (See, for example, my probably improper use of italics above —and here— when writing the words less and fewer. That’s almost certainly not right. I should probably have written them “less” and “fewer” —or maybe I shouldn’t have used any quotation marks at all. But I have always thought that you should italicize words when you use them as terms! I really have. They’re not appearing in your sentence as what they are substantively, but nominatively —so why not write them down as you would a term you’re borrowing from a foreign language?) Whatever else, you’ve still got to keep it clear. Commas, which I know I use too often, are there for a reason. They’re supposed to break things up by lists and clauses and phrases. But they also go with people’s names. Don’t question why. Just know it.
