When Proofreading Goes to Die: A Love Letter to Lost Apostrophes
You know what really gets under my skin? It’s not the trams running late (though that’s bloody annoying), or even the price of a decent coffee these days. It’s watching perfectly intelligent people throw basic grammar and punctuation out the window like they’re disposing of yesterday’s Herald Sun.
I stumbled across this discussion online about punctuation disasters, and honestly, it struck a nerve. There was this classic exchange where someone’s offering proofreading services, only to have a client with “30 years in media” smugly decline because they can handle their own copy, thank you very much. The punchline? Their response contained “Its my pleasure” – missing that crucial apostrophe that would make any English teacher weep.
But here’s the thing that really frustrated me: this isn’t just about typos or the occasional slip-up. We’re talking about systematic failures where businesses are literally putting their mistakes on display for years. One person shared a story about a menu board proudly displaying “potatos” for years because the owner’s university-educated wife was too proud to pay for proofreading. Another mentioned a beautifully hand-painted pizza menu where every instance of “tomato” was spelled “tomarto.”
The whole thread devolved into the kind of delicious irony that makes my DevOps-trained brain simultaneously cringe and chuckle. People correcting others while making their own mistakes, deliberate errors designed to catch the grammar police, and layers of sarcasm so thick you’d need a chainsaw to cut through them.
Working in IT, I see this mentality all the time. Someone will reject automated testing because they’re confident in their code, then spend three days debugging something that would have been caught in five minutes with proper testing. It’s the same hubris, just applied to the English language instead of Python scripts.
What really bothers me is how this reflects our broader relationship with expertise. We live in an era where everyone’s an expert on everything – from epidemiology to economics – yet we can’t be bothered to run a simple spell check or, heaven forbid, pay a professional to review our public-facing content. The irony is that in our hyper-connected world, these mistakes live forever. That “potatos” menu isn’t just embarrassing the owner; it’s teaching every kid who walks past that maybe spelling doesn’t matter.
I’m not asking for perfection here. We all make mistakes, and autocorrect has turned us all into accidental comedians at some point. My daughter regularly sends me texts that would make a linguistics professor question the future of human communication. But there’s a difference between a casual typo in a text message and a business owner proudly declining professional help because they went to university thirty years ago.
The Australian context makes this even more painful. We’ve got this tall poppy syndrome thing going on where admitting you need help with something as “basic” as spelling feels like admitting weakness. Meanwhile, we’re happy to pay specialists to fix our cars, cut our hair, or debug our networks, but proofreading? Nah, she’ll be right mate.
Maybe we need to reframe this. Instead of seeing proofreading as an admission of failure, we should see it as quality control. In my work, code reviews aren’t insults to the developer’s intelligence – they’re essential parts of the process. Fresh eyes catch things you miss when you’ve been staring at the same text for hours.
The silver lining in all this? At least these grammar disasters are giving us something to talk about. That radio station with their “Radio at it is best” billboard probably got more attention for their typo than they would have with perfect punctuation. Sometimes the best marketing is accidental marketing, even if it’s not the kind you’d put in your portfolio.
Still, part of me dies inside every time I see a professional business displaying their inability to distinguish between “its” and “it’s.” But hey, at least it keeps the rest of us entertained, right?