I saw this in the closed captioning on Usher’s “Make Love in this Club” video on one of my gym’s TV sets this morning.

Problems:
A comma and an apostrophe are missing.

Explanation:
First, there is a natural pause when one says someone’s name and then says the rest of the sentence. This pause should be indicated by a comma, so there should be a comma between “BABY” and “LETS” (sic).

Second, “LETS” is a contraction of “LET US”. A contraction requires an apostrophe to indicate the omission of one of more letters, so the omitted “U” in the contraction requires the apostrophe as its substitute.

Granted, closed captioning for live events will have typographical errors.

A music video, on the other hand, should have no typographical errors, given that it is not live and that producers spend small fortunes to produce them.

I searched Google for the lyrics and found them — with the same errors — here and here (among many sites).

This shows that the omissions in the closed captioning were not typographical errors; the omissions are in the original lyrics.

I believe that both of these omissions are consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to omit the comma and the apostrophe than to include them.

Solution:
“BABY, LET’S MAKE LOVE.”