Something weird happened to me yesterday.

First I got an email from Kacia. Kacia has earned her RPB Badge many times over, so this was obviously getting posted.

Oh, Target. How many ways is this wrong? The word you’re abbreviating is “until,” so there’s no need to add an extra “l” when you abbreviate it. I’ll let the backwards single-quote function as an apostrophe because there’s no point in getting too technical when you’re going to do stuff that stupid. And then, of course, there’s… whatever is going on up top there. You’re missing an apostrophe in “time’s,” and even if we allow the lack of capitalization because you’re being artsy, the colloquialism you were looking for is a-ticking (or, one might argue, a-tickin’) and not… whatever that dot is.

YARRRRRGH.

Then! This is the weird part! Moments later, I got a text. At first I thought Kacia had gone all overboard and REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted me to post this, but then I realized it was actually from Q! But it is subtly different!

I will tell you that my head nearly asplode with the “tictac,” because that was all I could see in my text software. At first I thought they’d decided to Frenchify the common “tick-tock,” or else it was some kind of subliminal breath mint advertising (do they still make those things? they were gross). But when I scrolled down and saw the Spanish below I figured they probably just decided to translate it funny. Because the English doesn’t say “Tick-tock. Tick-tock.” It says “We don’t know how to use apostrophes, and we’re trying to use a colloquial construction but haven’t quite let go of our fondness of the letter ‘g.'”

Perhaps they couldn’t figure out how to say all that in Spanish?

Thanks, Kacia and Q!