Joseph Yukich, a math professor at Lehigh was rated one the top 300 college professors in the nation in a poll conducted by The Princeton Review and RateMyProfessors.com. Yukich's profile was printed ...
How do I know when to use Jon and I, or Jon and me? I can't really figure it out. I've tried to teach myself, but I just can't seem to do it. Will someone please help me figure this problem out?
grammar - Jon and I or Jon and me? - English Language & Usage Stack ...
The main difference between lying and not using a comma in "Thanks, John", in your analogy, is that lying is a deliberate act of deception that often has negative consequences for the person being lied to, whereas dropping that comma is unlikely to have any negative consequences for the reader and is often not done deliberately. It's a poor analogy.
Definitely include the comma. 'Good morning' is the declarative statement, the core of the sentence fragment. 'John' is a qualifier, a separate add-on that clarifies who speaker is directing statement to. Compare: "Good morning, whoever you are." Without a comma, the phrase would means something along the lines of 'John of good mornings'. (Some people might like to be greeted that way!) The ...
From this, I would tentatively conclude that (1.) the vernacular pronunciation of the name became a single-syllable "Jon" fairly early on, and (2.) the John spelling might have originally been a Latin-language abbreviation, but it came to be used as the standard vernacular spelling because it matched the vernacular pronunciation.