Alison Morris

Punctuation Problems and Cake Wrecks

Imagine ordering a cake for your daughter's baby shower only to pick it up and find that not one but TWO of the three words you asked to have written on the cake had been misspelled. Such was the case for one of the many people (see photo at right) whose cake disasters are represented on the painfully funny blog my friend Joyce Farnsworth introduced me to last week. Cake Wrecks, as it's called, features professional cakes gone "horribly, hilariously wrong." And a surprising number of them "went wrong" because someone in the bakeshop spelled something incorrectly or used bizarre punctuation.

I'd forgotten that misused (or rather, unnecessary) quotation marks could be so entertaining until I saw the cake pictured below, which is featured in a post appropriately titled "Gee, thanks, 'kids'."



Lots of people, though, apparently find errors in spelling and punctuation entertaining enough to have started blogs for the sole sake of calling attention to those that appear in public. Take a look at the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, for example, on which appears the photo that's pasted below.



Fellow Bostonians may recognize some of the sights and signs that appear on Apostrophe Castastrophes, a blog created by the daughter of local children's book author Jane Sutton. Becky is not above calling out even the most sacred of children's books for its missing apostrophes. Take a peek at her post about Goodnight Moon.

Blogs similar to Becky's (which has the best name of the apostrophe lot!) include Aspostrophe Abuse and Apostrophism. Widening the scope a bit, there are errors of every shape and size over at the English Fail Blog. And then, of course, there's Engrish.com. If you haven't visited this site before, I recommend setting aside some time before you do so. And be sure you're in a place where people won't object to your guffawing loudly.

Of course, if you're a punctuation eagle-eye who's in the habit of actually altering the typos you see in public, let me warn you that not everyone takes kindly to unsolicited copy editing. The National Park Service recently took issue with the actions of a pair calling themselves the Typo Eradication Advancement League and the duo found themselves in some rather hot water.

But at least they weren't in "hot" water. Or hot "water."

Posted by Alison Morris on August 25, 2008 | Comments (4)