One of these days I'll compile the Great List Of Things Which Make Me Stop Reading, those things which within so much as the first few paragraphs will send me straight over to the back button without a moment's thought. Containing of course such obviousnesses as the previously-covered 'lover', 'the grey-eyed man' (seriously, yo, who remembers people by the colour of their eyes? in fact, who remembers the colour of people's eyes?) and suchlike epithets, also fangirl britglish etc, but also that bane of my existence, the awful the horrible the absence of the vocative comma. O, vocative comma, how you leaven and lighten my reading, how you aid comprehension, how you form an integral part of any conversation recorded to littera, how without you any piece of writing becomes if not incomprehensible certainly irritating.

For those of us unfamiliar with spurious grammatical terms made up on the spur of the moment to identify a rule which may already have a name but just seemed so self-evident before:
the vocative comma either precedes or succeeds (or both) someone's name when that person is being addressed in direct speech. Examples:
"Ginny, are you alright?"
"Shut up, Ron."
"Now, Ginny, that's no way to talk to your brother."

It is fucking shocking that people with otherwise comprehensible grammar seem unfamiliar with this essential rule. It should follow naturally from the law of pauses (yanno, the 'if you would naturally take a breath or pause here when speaking, then there should probably be a comma' one), it's an aspect of the law of clause separation by conjunction or punctuation mark, it's enforced by editors in English across the world.

One of these days I'm going to work out which rules of grammar I allow myself to break in fiction: the one that really stands out is the sentence without a verb finite, although the sentence started with 'and' is creeping in there. 'Fiction', here, meaning pure third person, for in close-third or first or even second I may well make allowance for contraction, colloquialism, similar errors. Linguists I have known seem to hate these fixed rules of grammar (also of meaning), to find them incompatible with 'real' speech: I like them for the check they provide, the way they force formal language to undergo an almost Lamarckian evolution while informal language carries on its merry Darwinian way. Which anyway is no binary division, no such straw men: informal language is affected by the rules and evolutions of formal speech just as much as vice versa, and they blend and mingle constantly in speech and the written word.

Er.

One of these days, I will make good on my threats.