I don’t want to be the guy who’s always correcting people’s punctuation, but sometimes someone goes too far. Take a couple seconds to study this poster that I pulled off the noticeboard at work (in the heart of Oxford, the seat of learning):
Grammar FAIL
Did you spot it? If you scanned down to the bottom line, you did. “DVD,s”? “CD,s”?
For some reason I find this heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. I picture a skinny, pierced little music enthusiast sitting at his computer keyboard, nearly beside himself and in tears with desperation, gazing in abject confusion at the whole bucketful of punctuation that clusters on the right-hand side of his keyboard. His mind dimly recalls a hazy scene now almost twenty years in his past when he was told the rule for pluralising abbreviations, but he can’t quite recall what it was. Did he even have to do anything at all? No, there must be something. The situation is complicated by the fact that these plural abbreviates are in a list as well.
A thought occurs to him that arrives with a thrill, like the call to adventure. Plural abbreviations in a list? When has that ever happened before? Never! There IS NO RULE for that! He’s off the maps here — uncharted territory. Humanity may have reached this point at some point in the grammatical past, but if they did, no one remembered it, or left any markings to remember them by. There ARE no conventions here. He IS convention. The rules are whatever he makes them.
Boldly wiping the sweat from his palms, he reaches his skinny, pierced finger out and in a fit of creativity unwittingly creates the Frankensteinian abomination above.
And the tragedy is that he could have got it right if he only did what he did with “100s of 1000s” in the line above and declined from inserting any punctuation at all. That part of grammatical application is actually correct (if inelegant), and would have been correct here as well.
But such is Man.
