"We don't know much about Harry Styles's first album in four years beyond its title and it's already causing some grammatical consternation. The follow-up to 2022's Grammy-winning Harry's House is a bit more esoterically named: Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. In an era when fans clinically investigate every aspect of pop stars' lives, it was perhaps inevitable that Styles's choice of punctuation would draw scrutiny."
"The key dilemma: is the comma in the right place? We're going through a really experimental period with comma usage, wrote @poeticdweller in an X post with nearly 1m views. One concern appeared to be that the two sentences don't follow the same rules: The comma turns the second sentence from a parallel imperative sentence to a fragment that vaguely gestures toward the occasional presence of disco, noted another post, in a sentiment echoed elsewhere."
"As for the first question, it's true that the lines are not parallel. If Harry is speaking in the imperative, telling us to kiss constantly and also to sometimes go to the disco using disco as a verb then it would be consistent to leave out the comma. But that doesn't necessarily mean Styles is doing anything wrong. It's not a perfect construction by our grammatical standards and that's fun,"
Only the title of Harry Styles's first album in four years, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., has been revealed so far. The inclusion and placement of a comma in that title prompted widespread scrutiny and online commentary. Observers questioned whether the comma creates a non-parallel construction or turns the second sentence into a fragment that implies occasional disco. Some argued that omitting the comma would preserve parallel imperative structure if 'disco' were a verb. Others, including Britt Edelen, said the imperfect construction adds dynamism and can be a deliberate stylistic choice, linking comma experimentation to literary examples like Virginia Woolf.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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