The 'Hi, comma'

And why grammar-conscious people like me aren't ready to say goodbye to it

Photo by Mayank Baranwal on Unsplash

My topic today is what Bill Walsh, the late copy desk chief for national news at The Washington Post, called the “Hi, comma” in his 2000 book Lapsing Into a Comma and “The lost comma” in his 2004 Elephants of Style. That he made the point in both books suggests he continued to feel that such commas are necessary — and now, decades later, I’m making the same point because I feel that way too.

Hardly anyone these days would put a comma in Hi Barbara — but here Barbara is directly addressing someone, just as it is in “What do you think you’re doing, Barbara?” and “What made you decide to write, Barbara?”

In those two sentences, a comma is obviously needed for meaning: Barbara is not the object of doing or write. Rather, it stands outside the main line of the sentence. Linguists would call this use of Barbara a vocative; performers would say it breaks the fourth wall; and grammarians like me call it direct address.

I suppose people began forgoing the comma after hi because in speech, there’s no pause after the word: Hi, Barbara sounds the same as Hi Barbara. But this is one of many instances where punctuation is meant to illuminate grammar rather than to mimic speech.

Similarly, the comma in No, thanks seems to be fading into obscurity, as Walsh also noted in Lapsing Into a Comma. But No thanks, as in No thanks to you …, means thanks are not being given, while No, thanks means Thank you, no.

You’re welcome.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.