Sunday, 1 April 2012

#207: Passionfruit Pedant

Are pensioners just naturally picky?   Notice that I did not say crabby or snarky ....just somewhat critical when, for example, certain standards are ignored or flouted.

I fear this sort of behaviour might be age-linked.  How else to explain my impulsive e-mail to Rush Munro's, a high end New Zealand manufacturer of really delicious ice cream?

I just happened to have purchased a container of their award winning passionfruit flavour, and I turned over the package hoping to find out more about the company.  There, on the bottom of the box, was a paragraph about their delight in introducing this product to New Zealander's.

New Zealander's.    That's right: apostrophe = plural.  Another apostrophe catastrophe.

Had this been a one-off sign outside a shop, I would have sighed and let it go.  But I knew that in convenience and grocery stores all over New Zealand, freezers were full of this ice cream, and felt compelled to inform Rush Munro's that they were perpetuating a punctuation error, big time. I told them that the care they took to create a quality product should apply to their packaging as well.

That's all. One e-mail.

Then I issued a warning to my pedantic, former-English-teacher-self. One e-mail was permitted, but this was not to become a habit. No more letters of complaint!  Just because I was retired and had the time,  I was not to give in to every inclination to correction.

And that's a promise.....I hope.



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