Just one of those things.

Although I was not an English major in school, as both an insatiable reader and an actress, I am a person to whom language has always mattered. Which means that, when left with no other basis on which to form an opinion, I will totally judge you based on proper use of grammar, whether or not you can spell words correctly, and your choice of punctuation. Did I forget to mention in my profile that I’m a big nerd?

Thus, the Manhattan Mini Storage ad campaign currently littering the New York City subway system (among other places) is causing me great amounts of pain. It’s not fair, when you’re on your way to work at 8:00 in the morning, to be confronted with this:



My head has started hurting, and I haven’t even gotten three blocks from home yet.

And that’s only the latest one I’ve seen; this one has been haunting my commute for the last month or so:



Do you see where I’m going with this? Because I’d like to just lay it out there: adding a circumflex to “Storanomical” doesn’t make the word fun and exciting, like the o is wearing a party hat. Throwing tildes around doesn’t make Manhattan Mini Storage lively and exotic; the kind of place that gives you a free rum punch when you cram your overstuffed cardboard boxes into the 4’x4’ unit and snap your padlock onto the door. Adding accents and umlauts where they are not intended to signal a change in pronunciation of the vowel they are over, but are seemingly only for decoration—like so much diacritical confetti—makes these ads look both pretentious and, frankly, rather dumb. And I most certainly don’t want my out of season clothes and the couch that wouldn’t fit into my studio left in a place that wants me to think that at any moment a liquor-soaked conga line is likely to break out among a tribe of, apparently, half-wits.

This is only the latest skirmish in a battle for the proper use of punctuation that is being waged in storefronts all over this city on a daily basis. For instance, just so we’re all clear, quotes are not intended to add emphasis. Quotes are used to identify a person’s written or spoken text, or to imply some room for doubt as to the accuracy of those words. Seeing “Fresh Fruit,” quotes and all, on a sign at your grocery store does not inspire confidence.

Punctuation is the indoor plumbing of the English language; overlooked most of the time, it’s when it gets taken away, or improperly used, that you realize just how much you’ve come to rely on it. Used correctly, however, one small punctuation mark can organize thoughts, signal a shift in emotion, or completely change the meaning of an entire sentence. Wouldn’t using them well make both them, and us, look better in the end?