Let's All Learn Some Basic Typography
I was strolling through the ArcLight on Friday, enjoying the quietness of the hall back by theater 5 and just generally happy to once again be at the best theater in town, when I saw this poster for Shoot ’Em Up, which appears to be an action-comedy:
I say “appears” because the tagline is willfully cheeky and is juxtaposed against the image of Clive Owen brandishing a gun in order to stand out from the pack of other movie ads, but that's really beside the point. The actual problem is a huge one, and I want you to say it all with me:
An apostrophe is not a quotation mark.
The error is egregious, and right there for everyone to see:
It’s not that the designers of the poster didn’t know they needed an apostrophe to indicate the “th” that had been dropped from “them” in the title. But they used the wrong punctuation for it, confusing an apostrophe with a single open-quote, which is absolutely incorrect. Here’s an example of an apostrophe:
Here’s an open-quote mark:
These are different things. You cannot interchange the two; this is not up for discussion. It’s possible to sidestep this issue entirely by using a simple vertical line instead of a curved or “smart” quote, as IMDb does on their page about the film:
But in most instances, smart-quotes are used, and that means that the designer should have had the basic training to know the difference between an apostrophe and a quote mark. Did New Line not think it was important to hire an ad company that employed copy editors?
This will bug me every time I see the poster. Every time.
Comments: 23
I find I have to shut down the design part of my brain every time I go out. Otherwise I find myself going, "Ugh, look at the gawdawful kerning on that sign" or "Hmm, they set this menu in a nice ITC Stone 9/13"
My biggest typography nitpick: I can't wait until the web allows proper use of en- and em-dashes. This double-hyphen stuff has got to stop.
that's a british apostrophe
they do everything backwards
silly brits need ot learn the language
Good Lord, that is going to eat at my brain. My personal pet peeve is possessive/plural confusion, which happens constantly at my job. SOP's is very different from SOPs people! Spellcheck even catches it. GAH!
My best friend got me a novelty shirt for my birthday. It reads:
Bad grammar makes me [sic]
Every time I see that poster I really want to fix it. With all the money that goes into a money like this why can't they find somebody to get the punctuation a quick little check over?
I so hate shit like this. Every time I drive down a certain road near my house, I am faced with the Rape Crisis Center billboard, on which "assaulted" is spelled as "assulted."
HOW DOES A FREAKING RAPE CRISIS CENTER MISSPELL "ASSAULT"??!!??
Dude, that's what bugging you about the poster? Did you miss the "I'm a British nanny and I'm dangerous"? It looks like a bad remake (as if there were any other kind) of Vin Diesel's The Pacifier.
Quite possibly, the designer knew the difference and decided what he chose just looked better. For the layman, isn't that the point?
No, not really.
Plus, it's not a case of which looks better; one is wrong, and one is right.
I used to think Clive Owen's hotness excused everything, but no, apparently not.
Ugh!
At my job, we currently are featuring something called "Patio Pinot G's". They're not possessing anything! I have been informed that it "looks wrong without the apostrophe." All it looks like to me is that someone stupid wrote our wine list.
I think you might have to blame Microsoft or the creator of the QWERTY keyboard on this one. Trying typing Shoot 'Em Up in MS Word and see what happens. As far as I know, unless you do something like Insert-->Symbol and find the fucking apostrophe, there's only one key to hit (next to the Enter key) which acts as both a single quote and an apostrophe, and Word decided which one is correct based on what you type. Now try typing the word can't and see what happens - right, the apostrophe was used. Fun stuff.
I work as a copyeditor at a newspaper and this problem, besides driving me batty, crops up more often than you'd think -- I flag about ten in an average day. People who pay no attention to such things simply don't care -- and I include graphic designers in this category, as they care about how something looks, not whether it is correct. And the assault on correct usage is perpetuated.
The problem, as you point out, Perl, is that in MS Word, when you type an apostrophe at the beginning of a word, the program believes you are beginning a set of single quotes and so uses the wrong symbol. The problem only arises in words that have apostrophes at the beginning, usually slang terms that contract the first part of the word; probably the most common is 'til.
(Oh and Perl, the simplest way to overcome it is not to use the Insert function, but simply to type two apostrophes in a row and then delete the first of them. Word will believe it is a set of single quotes with nothing between them, and the second symbol, a close single quote, is identical to an apostrophe in almost every typeface.)
Two gigantic weights pulling down the national IQ are the "greengrocer's apostrophe" (the classic ONION'S 2/$1.00) and the "Idiot's decimal" (TOMATOES .50 cents). So many times I've thought about demanding change for my penny...
The poster for The Talented Mr. Ripley drove me nuts. Its tagline said, "How far would you go to be someone else."
While we're on this poster, shouldn't a comma appear before the "and" in the tagline (i.e. two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction)? I mean, if you were going through the work of putting a period at the end of the sentence, wouldn't you just got ahead and slip the comma in there, too?
Yes, the tagline needs a comma.
I fear my opinion of this movie will now be hopelessly biased because of the poor poster.
My pet peeve is the misplaced quotes around things that aren't quoting anything:
Polo Shirts on "Sale"
"Buy One, Get One" Free on all shoes!
Grr- HATE that!!!!!
@GBR: Seriously. There's a dry cleaner near my house with a sign in the window that says
"No" Drying Without Washing
Every time I pass I want to run inside and throttle someone, anyone, who works there.
Yeah, I gotta go with Bianca on this one - if punctuation/typeset are the only things that bother you about this movie, then ... well, you're a better man than I am. Because I, for one, am loathe to see yet another remake of Kindergarten Cop, The Pacifier, and whatever the hell that nanny movie was that Hulk Hogan made in the '90's.
Thanks, Bowl! You're not Stupid at all.
If Clive takes his shirt off in this movie all will be forgiven. That said, I'm an editor and this sort of thing bugs the living shit out of me. I say we should just carry markers and make corrections as we see them.
good catch
You're just like Lynne Truss going apeshit over the movie title "Two Weeks Notice"!
Jul 23, 2007 12:13 AM