Last week, Allan Metcalf wrote about commas disappearing from around vocatives. A vocative is a direct address to a person, such as the reader in the following examples:
Metcalf was noticing that many people were not using commas, and I got a good dose of noticing that today when I received birthday messages on social media. What I wondered was: do British people use the comma less?
I have good reason for asking the question with that particular bias. Americans use a lot more commas than Brits do. Like that first comma in the blog post (Last week, ). Americans are much more likely to put a comma after an adverbial phrase at the start of the sentence. In the Corpus of Global Web-based English, the American texts have about 10% more commas than the British ones.
So here's my little experiment.
Research question: Is there a national difference in vocative comma usage?
Hypothesis: American birthday greetings have more vocative commas than British ones.
Data and Method: I went through the birthday greetings I received today on Facebook, Twitter, and email and looked for ones that were:
Results: My hypothesis is supported. Though the comma is at risk in both places, it seems stronger in the US, where 61% of the vocatives had commas, versus 27% in the UK.
Caveats: I have not accounted for age, level of education, or profession here. I'd guess that my British friends on Facebook are younger on average, just because I'm friends with more former students from the UK and they were students more recently than any US students I've had. That said, there weren't all that many former students using vocatives.
You know the birthday celebrations are getting rowdy when someone starts counting the commas.
Reader, let me tell you something about commas.I used commas here to separate reader from the rest of the sentence, because reader isn't a grammatical part of the sentence. It floats on a different plane from the subject and predicate.
Let me tell you something about commas, reader.
If you think, reader, that I'm not going to tell you about commas, think again.
Metcalf was noticing that many people were not using commas, and I got a good dose of noticing that today when I received birthday messages on social media. What I wondered was: do British people use the comma less?
I have good reason for asking the question with that particular bias. Americans use a lot more commas than Brits do. Like that first comma in the blog post (Last week, ). Americans are much more likely to put a comma after an adverbial phrase at the start of the sentence. In the Corpus of Global Web-based English, the American texts have about 10% more commas than the British ones.
So here's my little experiment.
Research question: Is there a national difference in vocative comma usage?
Hypothesis: American birthday greetings have more vocative commas than British ones.
Data and Method: I went through the birthday greetings I received today on Facebook, Twitter, and email and looked for ones that were:
- from an American or a Briton (I discounted any that were by people who were originally from another country)
- with a vocative: Happy birthday(,) Lynne was the most common form.
Results: My hypothesis is supported. Though the comma is at risk in both places, it seems stronger in the US, where 61% of the vocatives had commas, versus 27% in the UK.
| comma | none | |
|---|---|---|
| UK | 8 | 22 |
| US | 14 | 9 |
Caveats: I have not accounted for age, level of education, or profession here. I'd guess that my British friends on Facebook are younger on average, just because I'm friends with more former students from the UK and they were students more recently than any US students I've had. That said, there weren't all that many former students using vocatives.
You know the birthday celebrations are getting rowdy when someone starts counting the commas.
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