It’s been a while since I posted any examples of especially bad prose encountered during my day job as a mild-mannered proofreader at a major metropolitan corporation. I was beginning to think that I’d never again find anything dunderheaded enough to bother sharing with my Three Loyal Readers.
I was wrong. Check this out:
A period is defined as the amount of day’s/weeks it takes…
It’s not Egregious Corporate Speak in the sense of being a conglomeration of marketing buzzwords and other jargon, but it definitely appears to have been deliberately designed to give me a headache. The thing I don’t get is why more than one day requires the apostrophe while more than one week does not. Does someone think there are different pluralization rules for different time periods?
Oy.
Urgh…
Misuse of possessives is one of my trigger points when it comes to punctuation.
Yep, me, too, and for some reason I’ve been seeing a lot of this lately… a lot more than usual, that is.
Folk’s, who misuse punctuation should be: shot!
Or at least forcibly subjected to something that annoys them as much as their constant written errors annoy me…
Jason, have you ever read Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss? Methinks you would find it amusing at the very least. 🙂
I haven’t read that, but I’m aware of it, and Cranky Robert has recommended it to me several times. One of these days…