GrammarTroika Sister #2 is back in the game with this label from her daughter’s prescription. Apparently Walgreens isn’t sure this is a legal name.

I’ve only ever seen this on prescriptions for animals before — and even then, it has always driven me crazy. My pets have names, and those names are their real names. I always supposed that it was a legal thing, so pharmacies could distinguish between their human and non-human patients. But Skylar is definitely human; I’ve seen pictures of her. So this is kind of puzzling!

Thanks, Shannon!

Kacia took an online survey asking her if she had done a variety of things recently. Eventually she encountered this question.

Kacia says “Why they felt the need to write ‘etc.’ with quotation marks (and without a period) I will never know.” But I think we’ve seen this before. I think it’s the “Yikes, I don’t know how to do this” phenomenon, and in this case the guess almost makes more sense than other arbitrary punctuation-panic mistakes. This one is more like saying “You know that word that means ‘and so forth’? That’s the word I’m intending to put here and I know it’s sort of like ‘etc’ but that might not be exactly right.”

Still wrong, though.

Colleen, we talked about this earlier this week. You can’t just go around assuming these mistakes are mistakes. I mean, this person could well have been in business for only 3 years — or for 40. You don’t know unless you ask. (And if you asked, you clearly need to tell us about it.)

Also, while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about this little message:

I debated not sending it because the gal working there was so sweet. Alas, my hatred of quotation marks as emphasis overrides any sweetness.

DEMERITS! Good grief. Hesitation? What?!

Are you supposed to say “Do not interfere”?  Are they supposed to choke out “Do not interfere” in order to ask that you please, in fact, interfere?  SAVE THE QUOTATION MARKS, people.