Harry Styles album title sparks debate over comma use
Harry Styles’s first album in four years is titled Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., and its punctuation has provoked discussion online about whether the comma is in the right place. Commenters have focused on the effect of the comma, with a viral X post by @poeticdweller drawing nearly 1 million views and arguing the mark turns the second sentence into a fragment and breaks parallelism.
The album is due out 6 March, and some observers noted that reading the title as two imperatives would make the comma unnecessary, while others said the comma creates a deliberate pause or different adverbial sense. Britt Edelen, who posts as @poeticdweller and is a PhD candidate in English at Duke, told the outlet the construction is not perfect by strict grammatical standards but adds energy, while Ellen Jovin said the comma gives a mental break and that disco is not usually used as a verb.
Both commentators said context matters, pointing out this is an album title and a creative choice rather than formal prose. The piece also places the title in a broader trend of artists styling punctuation and capitalization on streaming platforms, citing examples such as Billie Eilish and Dijon and a Quartz analysis of non-standard capitalization in popular songs.
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Culture, Harry Styles, Britt Edelen, Ellen Jovin, Billie Eilish, Dijon