“Kindly leave Pets OUTSIDE”
Service Animals, Excepted
This sign is posted outside the local library, printed on bright yellow paper to keep pets out of the teeny-tiny library. I have a serious issue with this sign, and it has nothing to do with the fact that pomeranians are not typically service dogs.
The comma in this sign is unnecessary and confusing. It doesn’t make sense. Why do we need to pause before reading “excepted”? For dramatic effect, I suppose. To sit back and appreciate how much respect the Oakland Public Library has for service dogs and their masters? To think about our own attitudes towards service dogs and people with disabilities? To feel good that our library supports these beloved members of our society, unlike other terrible institutions we can’t think of right now that regularly kick service dogs in the mouth and shove blind people out of their establishments?
In a book or a long stretch of copy, an extraneous comma may be excused as a mistake. In a seven-word sign, one can be pretty sure the comma was placed there intentionally, and some thought was given to its effect. This is the part that irks me the most: to imagine this sign-maker sitting at the computer and smiling in a self-satisfied manner as he or she inserts the comma, reading the sentence over in his or her head and admiring the deference towards service dogs and people with disabilities that this little sign is showing.
I can even imagine the sign-maker printing out the brightly-colored sign and proudly showing it to their colleagues, and the colleagues all nodding approvingly to show how intelligent they are for noticing the effect of the comma and how sensitive they are to people with disabilities. Then the sign-maker prints out a half-dozen copies of the sign to post all over the library entrance (when one or two signs would surely suffice), and, finally, moves on to the next item on their to-do list, feeling a great sense of accomplishment.
What was truly accomplished here was another small step taken towards the degradation of the english language. Surely this sign-maker’s intentions were good, but this is nothing other than abuse of the english language. I have some advice for sign-makers everywhere: when in doubt, don’t use that comma, or especially that apostrophe.
In a world of smart phones, where most creative writing is in the form of text messages, where the US Postal service is being killed and the art of letter-writing lost, perhaps people feel the need to demonstrate their command of the english language and separate themselves from the sea of lols and dumb prose. Instead of letting a simple sentence sit on the page, delivering its message in its own simple way, perhaps they feel compelled to “punch it up a bit”, use some apostrophes, commas, or perhaps that sexiest of punctuation marks: the semi-colon.
The downside of this effort at compensating is that people are given the wrong idea of how punctuation should be used. I fear that the reasoning goes something like this: “The library had a really nice comma in their sign; I should probably try to use more commas”.
Perhaps I’m over-thinking this, but I believe we must all do our part in preserving this language of ours, and that the library ought to be a beacon of proper grammar in this stormy sea of texts, emails and television.
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