Law & Order: Punctuation Victims Unit
The joy of finding out that a ridiculous lawsuit could have been prevented by a hyphen and/or a comma.
I don’t know about y’all but I get about 30 newsletters a day from various publications wanting me to see what they have written about that day. Each newsletter typically contains 10 or so headlines, all written explicitly to make me want to click through. I know all the strategies behind this, as I’m sure you do, too.
So when I got the Beast Digest from Daily Beast yesterday, I OF COURSE was going to click through on the story headlined “Cheesed-Off New Yorker Sues Over Pasta Purveyor’s ‘Deceptive’ Ravioli.’” Right? Who wouldn’t?
So imagine my surprise when this turned out not only to be an article about an old man yelling at a cloud (of cheese), but about the importance of punctuation marks!
According to the lawsuit detailed in the story, which was filed this week in New York State Supreme Court, plaintiff Arnold Wachtel, 62, claims that:
The phrase “5 Cheese Ravioli” placed above a picture of five ravioli, coupled with the defendant's intentional omission of a hyphen between "5" and "Cheese,” implies to reasonable consumers that the defendant includes five ravioli in the packages like the ones purchased by Plaintiff. A hyphen would be needed to modify (i.e., compound modifier) "Ravioli" to act as an adjective if the defendant(s) meant to refer to the number of cheeses in the ravioli.
This is MAGNIFICENT. This is the level of grammatical nitpickiness to which we should all aspire. And this is not even the plaintiff’s main argument! This is just in there to scare the defendant out of protesting that the number 5 on the package refers not to the number of cheeses inside the ravioli, but to the number of ravioli in the package!
But then! Ottomanelli Bros. Inc. fights back!
Daily Beast quotes CEO Nick Ottomanelli (who was unaware he was being sued until a reporter called him, I’m sure much to the dismay of Mr. Wachtel) as saying, after he ignores the whole bit about the hyphen to point out that there are, in fact, five cheeses in the ravioli. He cops to the fact that a punctuation mark is missing, but not the one Mr. Wachtel is upset about:
“To the extent there lacks a comma due to error or intention, and whether or not that would clarify the messaging to a reasonable consumer are issues left open,” [Ottomanelli] said.
The fifth cheese in the ravioli, claims Ottomanelli, is sinisterly masked in the ingredient list by the omission of a comma between it and “eggs.”
Who will win the battle of the hyphen vs. the comma? Will Mr. Wachtel be awarded his $50,000 in damages for the “monetary harm” a mere hyphen could have prevented, or will Ottomanelli Bros. hastily install a comma in its ingredient list, preserving the integrity of the 5 Cheese Ravioli evermore? I can’t wait.