ggplot2 geom_boxplot: cannot remove x-axis tics and text - r

Question

All references to removing axis tics and text say to change the theme's elements to blank. It's not working for me. Here's an example:
p2 <- ggplot(data = sal_pH, aes(x = NULL, y = quant)) +
stat_boxplot(geom = "errorbar", width = 0.3) +
geom_boxplot(# custom boxes
color='#00008B',
fill='#00008B',
alpha=0.4,
# custom outliers
outlier.color='blue1',
outlier.fill='white',
outlier.size=2) +
coord_flip() +
theme_classic(axis.text.x=element_blank(),
axis.ticks.x=element_blank()) +
xlab('Salem') +
ylab('pH') +
ylim(6.0, 10.0)
R throws this error:
Error in theme_classic(axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.ticks.x = element_blank()) (from all_pH_plots.r#30) :
unused arguments (axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.ticks.x = element_blank())
Is there a way to remove x-axis tics and text using the classic theme?

Answer 1

Having a look at theme_classic's source we can see that is a custom call to theme and theme_bw. We can add axis.text.x=element_blank() and axis.ticks.x=element_blank() and the ticks are removed. I used mtcars dataset as dummy data.
library(tidyverse)
theme_classic_custom <- function(base_size = 11, base_family = "", base_line_size = base_size / 22,
base_rect_size = base_size / 22) {
theme_bw(
base_size = base_size, base_family = base_family,
base_line_size = base_line_size, base_rect_size = base_rect_size
) %+replace%
theme(
panel.border = element_blank(), panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), axis.text.x = element_blank(),
axis.ticks.x = element_blank(),
axis.line = element_line(
colour = "black",
size = rel(1)
), legend.key = element_blank(),
strip.background = element_rect(
fill = "white", colour = "black",
size = rel(2)
), complete = TRUE
)
}
as_tibble(mtcars) %>%
ggplot(aes(x = mpg, y = hp)) +
theme_classic_custom() +
geom_point()
Created on 2021-12-01 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)