What's that, now? You don't know about the vocative comma? Let me explain with a little grammar lesson (although I'm sure many of my readers know a helluva lot about grammar). Each word in a sentence has a function. The function of a word is referred to as its case. You learn about cases when you study a language like Latin or German. In those languages (called "inflected") and others, the ending of a word changes based on its case. We have that a little in English (who vs. whom, for example), but in English, word order creates context and meaning. In inflected languages, word order is less important. The words with their different endings convey all the meaning you need. You can figure out a word's function just by looking at its ending (we called that "parsing"). Word endings for nouns can tell you number and gender, while verb endings convey person, number, tense, and voice.
Anyhoo, long story short, we have cases in English, we just never use that terminology to talk about them. The nominative case refers to the subject of a sentence, the accusative is the direct object, and so on. The vocative case refers to someone in the sentence who is being called or addressed ("vocative" comes from the Latin word "vocare" meaning "to call"). As in, "Hey, you!" In English, vocative commas help the reader understand who is being addressed. In the sentence, "Get me that wrench, John," I'm addressing John. Without the comma, the meaning of the sentence changes. "Get me that wrench John," is telling some unknown person or entity to acquire something called a "wrench John" whatever that is. (Perhaps it's a little bathroom for wrenches?)
So if I say, "Don't eat Mom!" I must be addressing some cannibal who's about to cook up my Mom for dinner. But if I say, "Don't eat, Mom!" then I'm telling her not to chow down on the food. Maybe because it's not cooked properly or something.
Everyone good on the grammar? Okay, good. Let's get to my rant.
The ad campaign for the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall features a series of seemingly handwritten billboards. One says, "YOU SUCK SARAH MARSHALL." What could this billboard mean?
1) It could be a message FROM Sarah Marshall, telling someone else that they suck. As in:
You suck!
--Sarah Marshall
But that doesn't seem likely because we don't have the punctuation to back it up.
2) Someone could be telling Sarah Marshall that she sucks:
You suck, Sarah Marshall!
But there is no vocative comma, so it can't mean that, can it?
3) Someone could be making an observation about someone else actually sucking Sarah Marshall. Maybe 'Sarah Marshal' is a new variety of frozen treat akin to the popsicle:
You suck Sarah Marshall.
Perhaps the billboard should include an accompanying sentence to clarify:
You suck Sarah Marshall; isn't she delicious?
Or not.
Obviously the ad wizards meant the second one, but how the hell are we supposed to get that from what is written?
Vocative commas, people (<-- look there's one right there!). They're cheap and they convey meaning. Gah.
You can categorize this post as nerd wankage, and sure, that's exactly what it is, but don't you agree there should be someone who fights for the freaking commas??? Grrr.
/rant
Here's a funny anecdote I heard in Latin class. Apparently Sanskrit has something like fourteen cases (more than double that of Latin). It must have been grammatical chaos to ask for anything. My Latin teacher in college told us that the worst insult one could hurl at a speaker of Sanskrit was to call him "an incompetent grammarian." Gee, you think?
If I met the marketing crew that put together the Sarah Marshall campaign, I'd call them incompetent grammarians, but I doubt they'd let it bother them too much. Jerks.
~Hero
4 comments:
Hello, dear writer. Unfortunately, many people also discard the vocative comma in Portuguese. It's really annoying.
In some languages, vocatives are expressed by suffixes or prefixes. However, they are extremely important in our languages, as it's expounded on this page.
Save it!
Thanks for the post. A minor quibble: 14 is not more than twice the number of Latin cases; it is exactly twice, if you count the locative.
Case actually applies only to nouns and pronouns and a language with a fully-fledged case system has inflected nouns and pronouns to mark the words syntactical function. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: "The Latin nominal case system has disappeared in all modern languages except Romanian, in which the inflected article distinguishes the nominative and accusative from the genitive and dative. Thus, when other Romance languages would use a preposition to indicate a certain relationship between words, Romanian resembles Latin in using an inflected form...
In English grammatical function is indicated by word order and prepositions rather than by case, which is a change in a words form rather than a function. English has vestiges of a case system in some pronouns, but they no longer mark a words grammatical function as they did when word order was flexible.
Some linguists argue that English does not have 'case' at all.
Case actually applies only to nouns and pronouns and a language with a fully-fledged case system has inflected nouns and pronouns to mark the words syntactical function. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: "The Latin nominal case system has disappeared in all modern languages except Romanian, in which the inflected article distinguishes the nominative and accusative from the genitive and dative. Thus, when other Romance languages would use a preposition to indicate a certain relationship between words, Romanian resembles Latin in using an inflected form...
In English grammatical function is indicated by word order and prepositions rather than by case, which is a change in a words form rather than a function. English has vestiges of a case system in some pronouns, but they no longer mark a words grammatical function as they did when word order was flexible.
Some linguists argue that English does not have 'case' at all.
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