Is it acceptable to drop the comma in "Thanks, John"? [duplicate]
Dropping the comma is certainly in common usage, but it's not correct. I don't think we even get to the prescriptive/descriptive issue with this one, as the failure to use a comma in this way makes things significantly less readable.
It would be great if someone could give an official name to this comma. I've heard 'addressive comma' occasionally, but 'vocative comma' seems to be more common.
Check out the Vocative Case on Wikipedia, or see a couple of blogs which make good points about the necessity of this comma:
- Sean and the Vocative Comma
- Tales from a Whale's Belly
It is acceptable to drop the comma.
Searching the following sources for "Thanks [noun]" (where possible), or "Thanks John" (where not) reveals that both are in extremely common use:
- The British National Corpus (BNC)
- The BBC website
[Note that for the BNC you can search for either "thanks , [n]" or "thanks [n]" to find the word "thanks" followed by a noun.]
Most of the occurrences in the BNC appear to be in transcripts of spoken material, which one may wish to discount when considering this question, but even just looking at written material it is clear that both usages are very common.