Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sometimes it's the little things

apostrophe vs. open single quote McCain Palin convention banner ... and then there’s this, about which the less said the better: CNN Race 08 graphic

3 comments:

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

Those who don't understand the difference—or at least those whose staff members don't understand the difference—should never be allow to hold office.

Dick Margulis said...

Well, I guess that means we shouldn't vote for anyone at CNN, either.

Katharine, you know how I do rail against the MBA mentality, so maybe this is a stretch. But what I see here is a campaign manager (read: MBA) deciding he can whip out his own banner graphic without help from anyone with actual expertise.

But there's also the problem that Microsoft Word's autocorrect feature gets this wrong all the time. You'd think, after all these years, that someone would have figured out a way to trap for the difference between an apostrophe and a single quote, particularly in front of a numeral.

Anonymous said...

I know this deals with single quote vs. apostrophe, but you might want to share this with Bethany at The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks at http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/ -- sometimes she explores other misuses of punctuation.