Commas
Q. Are phrases regarding the location of something deemed restrictive or not? Must one know whether only one exists in order to insert commas? I know it is always “the White House, in Washington, D.C.” But must it also then be “Bob’s Hardware in Dallas” when I do not know if there are other places that go by the same name? If I encountered “Bob’s upstairs neighbor Bill,” and didn’t know if he lived below one person or on the second floor of a ten-story building, I would have to make it restrictive, yes? So wouldn’t the same rule apply here? I work for a weekly magazine without a research department and this question has been preying on my frazzled mind for some time—please help!
A. I must admit that this problem has never crossed my mind—probably because copy editors rarely have the time and resources to check every fact they read and must therefore allow a certain amount of ambiguity in order to get through the day. When the facts are unknown, I would treat the phrase as though it were restrictive, with the reasoning that it’s cleaner and easier to omit the commas. In fact, in informal prose, CMOS sanctions this treatment in phrases that are technically nonrestrictive (e.g., Ursula’s husband Clifford; see CMOS 6.43).
