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Politically-correct typography
March 9, 2008

In 2000, “W” bumper stickers began to appear. They had – still have – an incorrect apostrophe on them. In 2004, President Bush’s non-typographical people changed the ’00 to ’04 and started again. Many of those stickers are still out there, screen-printed testaments to bad typography. Kerry’s bumper sticker had the correct apostrophe in 2004, but you don’t see many of those these days (I have a friend with an original Kennedy/Johnson bumper sticker on his Edsel).

I decided to look around at the candidates’ signs to see if any of the current crop of politicians is abusing punctuation. Curiously, none of the candidates is doing it wrong on the official signage, and that amazes me.


I visited Café Press, a site where you can order one-off T shirts, bumper stickers, posters and other printed matter (a good subject for a future blog on personalized printing), and they have a lot of unauthorized presidential bumper stickers, yard signs, posters, shirts, and more. In that selection there is not a single offering for any candidate which features the correct apostrophe (where the apostrophe is used, it is used incorrectly).

They have stickers and buttons for Obama in ‘08, Ron Paul in ‘08, McCain in ‘08. They probably offer Bozo the Clown in ‘08, and all of them are dead wrong.

How does this happen? Most likely it occurs when they hit the “ugly” typewriter quote key on the keyboard and follow it with a zero and an eight. As advanced as our software is today, applications can’t understand the apostrophe when it’s used on numerals. Here are the results of my simple test on applications:

Typing:
Microsoft Word:     ‘08    incorrect
Adobe InDesign:    ‘08    incorrect
QuarkXPress 7:      ‘08    incorrect

Importing:
Adobe InDesign:    ‘08    incorrect
QuarkXPress:         ‘08    incorrect

Well, that’s an impressive track record! Not a single success in all of those tests! What this shows is that the engineers who specify the code, and the engineers who build the code, either:

a.    Have a callous disregard for correct punctuation, or
b.    Have a callous disregard for correct punctuation.

They may not know how to use an apostrophe. To get the correct character (the apostrophe), one must put the character in by hand. On Macintoh, it’s Option-Shift-], on Windows I find it’s easiest to use the Characters palette to choose the correct apostrophe, and then double-click it (that, or type-in the ASCII value for the character).

Of the major candidates running recently, the only two who dared to use the apostrophe are Barack Obama and Ralph Nader, both of whose design teams have executed this correctly. The other candidates just avoid the apostrophe (They probably know I’ll let them know about their error).

So, to ask a more fundamental question: Why isn’t our software sophisticated enough to help us to use apostrophes in dates correctly? I am pretty sure the rule could be:

If, after a space (or at the beginning of a line), the typist types an apostrophe and two numerals, and does not close with a single closed-quote, then this must be an apostrophe, which requires the substitution of the real thing – the apostrophe. If the typist has already typed a double-quote, and is not typing a single quote to cite someone within a quoted expression – then this must be an open single-quote, etc.

This isn’t rocket science; it’s computer science. If the political candidates can get it right, then software engineers should be able to do it.


Across the board, the quality of typography on the official campaign materials this season is excellent. And, among the nicest offerings are Mike Huckabee’s state-specific graphics. I applaud the campaigns for paying attention to these details. Now I have to go work on the movie industry.

Posted by Brian Lawler on March 9, 2008 | Comments (0)