During a recent coupon-clipping marathon, a full-page ad with very large text caught my eye.  It was for a nationwide sandwich chain.  The all-caps copy read: “READY WHEN YOUR HUNGRY,” with no punctuation at the end.  I was confused, and spent several moments searching for the rest of the text.  I assumed that this ad campaign was personifying Hungry, turning the word into a character.  (Weight Watchers has done this in TV ads; Hungry is a fuzzy, orange, monster-like puppet.)  But I couldn’t find what Hungry was up to.

“Ready when my Hungry what?” I wondered.  ”Strikes?  Attacks?”

The truth hit me like a sickening punch in the gut.  Hungry was not a character.  I had been victimized, yet again, by punctuation crime.

I stared at the YOUR, reeling, uncomprehending.  How many people must have seen this ad before it was printed?  How many tens of thousands of these ads were shipped out in coupon packets in newspapers all over the country?  How many heads will roll when someone in charge sees this atrocity?

Bitterly, I told myself, “Probably none.  No one cares anymore.”  It’s a lonely existence for a punctuation stickler.

Lynne Truss describes it well in her excellent and hilarious (take my word for it) book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  ”Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler.  While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight.  We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except we can see dead punctuation.”

Bad punctuation can happen in the most unexpected places, and even to the best of families.  It pains me to admit to you that my own father is a profligate apostrophe abuser.  He trots through his emails like a flower girl in a wedding, except his basket is full of unsuspecting apostrophes.  He gleefully flings them about with no regard for where they land.  The helpless apostrophes dangle uselessly in words where they have no business being.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that this cycle of abuse will stop with me.