Vale, Vocative

Texting has introduced a revolution in communication, and for some of us that is not always a good thing.  An article I read recently, for instance, demonstrated in detail the damage, if not quite full death, that the apostrophe has suffered as a result of the inconvenience to use the key combinations necessary on phones and tablets to punctuate possessives and other grammatical instances appropriately.  I have long lamented the eclipse of the apostrophe on road and street signs.  Look around.  You may not have noticed but now you will -- except if you are going to Martha's Vineyard, one of the few places that has received an exception by the bureaucratic authorities who make such subtle but momentous decisions.

As troubling as the loss of apostrophes is to me, there is another loss even more disconcerting personally.  It is the near total annihilation of the vocative.

A vocative construction, as its name implies, is used when invoking, calling, hailing, or addressing someone. (Ironically, for present purposes, the literary device of addressing someone not present is called an apostrophe, and it is to my mind no coincidence that both are on life support or have been dispatched to a new grammatical gulag system.)  For example, you might say, "John, where is my hat?"  In that interrogative, the vocative is the address to John, and it is marked off with a comma.  The same sort of construction occurs when we greet people, "Hello, John."  It is just a common affair. It happens every day.

But that is just the thing that is so troubling:  the loss of the vocative now also happens every day and everywhere.  I sampled the other week four people in the same context, and not one of them had heard of a vocative construction, much less knew that it is proper to mark vocative uses with a comma.  They just took for granted that what they did multiple times a day with their friends on their phones was the formally and grammatically proper way to write, if they happened to think about grammar as a system at all.

For someone such as I am who finds grammar for the most part an anchor in a seismically changing world, this development, including the grammatical ignorance, is unsettling. I see this everywhere, and it irks me.  It is not just in professional e-mails that begin "Hi Polytropos" -- without a comma.  It is not just that I find my cortisol levels rising whenever I log into Google, the splash page for which greets me "Hi Polytropos" without a comma.  I see it occasionally at more festive times, for instance, when a group of people want to celebrate someone's birthday, and they order a cake with a message inscribed in the icing.  This happens more than you might think, at least in my social experience.  Without exception, the last 7 cakes (that's all I can remember; I'm sure the streak is longer) have all used a vocative incorrectly in wishing someone happy birthday by name, the equivalent to "Happy Birthday Polytropos!" -- without a comma.

Now, I realize that you might think, "Heavens!  This Polytropos is a grammatical grouch." I dispute that, and you can read some of my other prior posts about grammar for explanations of why I think it is important (e.g., here and here and here and here).  But grammar has real life and death consequences. 

Consider, if you will, this tag line in an e-mail that I received not long ago from a favorite restaurant, which also happened to be the e-mail's subject:  "Let's eat everyone!"

Think about that for a moment.   "Let's eat everyone!"

Good.  Kind of revolting, huh?  This exhortation was meant to be an encouragement to fine dining.  The clause was, after all, that used by the talented chef who said that to his patrons after surveying their culinary preferences and the wine that they brought before he embarked on a seven-course tasting menu.  The e-mail that was meant to invite one to dinner out caused me to lose my appetite, and all because of a vocative -- without a comma.

When the restaurateur failed to mark off the vocative properly, what should have been the hortatory subjunctive, "Let's eat, everyone!" became an invitation to cannibalism.  Grammar has real life and death consequences.

You might say to yourself, "Well, I can sort of understand the need to mark off the addressee(s) in the case when preceded by a verb of a certain action, but surely it is negotiable in other instances, like greetings." But then you have created a rule, and you have re-written a grammatical rule, and you seem to invoke the following of that rule.  So, I might rejoin, why not just follow the rules that already exist for good reason rather than do gymnastics to create your own rules?

The grammatical descriptivist is the person who, generally, says that grammar is what people do with it.  But if the innate descriptivist becomes to some extent a prescriptivist (grammar is what convention has for good reason laid down ought to be done), then the principle of rules in grammar is conceded, and the burden of proof for deviating from proper practice is on the one who has inherited a grammatical deviation largely by technological change, social practice, and poor primary education.

The loss of certain punctuation and the erosion of both grammar and clear writing are, I think, largely the effects of the prevalence of texting.  It is also more than that.  It is a function of different discourse, one that is implicitly imperialistic.  It is also a function of not merely what people write but also what people read (or do not read).  It is, moreover, a function of lack of basic instruction about what is becoming and why.  When I explained to those four people mentioned above what a vocative is, why it is used, and why it is punctuated the way that it is, with examples, at least three of the four said, "Oh, well, I've never heard of that, but it makes perfect sense.  I see it now."

Maybe that is all it takes, small steps in our own circles, to resist the grammatically insidious domination of Google's login page, e-mail greetings, and cake decorators in our daily life. This is, indeed, a Resistance movement.  You can join.  It really does depend on you.  Otherwise, an invitation to punctuate might be corrupted further, not only in form but also in diction:  "Let's puncture everyone." One mistake might lead to more, and that's how grammar can be a matter of life or death.  We will then be saying "Vale!" to a lot more than the vocative.