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Punctuation Changes the Meaning
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Two (or more) sentences are identical in word choice and order, but placement of punctuation changes their meaning. Observe the difference between "Execute not; liberate" and "Execute, not liberate" — one says "don't kill" and the other says "kill". A common grammar joke refers to a comma being the difference between inviting your grandmother to dinner ("Let's eat, Grandma!") versus telling your family to cannibalize her ("let's eat Grandma!"). Someone might add or change existing writing on purpose if they stand to benefit from the modification: for example, making a sign mean the complete opposite thing by adding a few marks. It probably won't stand up as a defense if they get in trouble, though. Spoken, this is often Ambiguous Syntax. The classic "man-eating plant/man eating plant" isn't so ambiguous when shown in written form, assuming the writer knows how to use a hyphen. This is often an example of Poor Communication Kills. Might be caused by Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma if someone miswrites or miscopies a sentence. Unnecessary quotation marks will look like Scare Quotes. This trope is for examples where the meaning of a statement is changed by adding, erasing, or moving punctuation (but the words remain the same), and it has to occur within the work. This trope is not about the audience pointing out grammatical errors. Examples where the ambiguity is not resolved goes under Ambiguous Syntax. Examples |
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In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the introduction to the Show Within a Show, delivered by carpenter Peter Quince, is punctuated so that every sentence means the opposite of what is clearly intended (the implication being that Quince is nervous or just plain bad at line delivery). It's lampshaded by the In-Universe audience. | |
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BoJack Horseman: In "lovin that cali lifestyle!!", gubernatorial candidate Woodchuck-Coodchuck Berkowitz runs into a scandal when he receives a hand transplant from a pedophile/murderer (as in, a pedophile and a murderer). When learning about the news, Tom Jumbo-Grumbo assumes the hand donor was a pedophile-murderer (as in, someone who kills pedophiles), until Katrina aggressively corrects him. | |
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The Simpsons: In "The Day The Violence Died", Bart objects to Amoral Attorney Lionel Hutz's request for money up front, because his card says "Works on Contingency — No Money Down." Hutz hastily claims that it is just a typo and then "corrects" the card by adding punctuation with a sharpie so it reads "Works on Contingency? — No, Money Down!" In "Sweets and Sour Marge", Marge was shopping at the Kwik-E-Mart when she finds a package of what she assumes contains sugar-free donuts, overlooking the comma in the writing on the package (which says "Sugar, Free Donuts") until Apu points it out. In "Barting Over", Lisa finds a videotape titled "Bart Sad", which intrigues her, and so she puts it in the VCR to play. However, when she finds a commercial starring Bart as a baby, she realizes that this should have said "Bart's Ad" |
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Parks and Recreation: Leslie buys stickers saying "Don't" and "?" to change the "Recall Leslie Knope" signs into "Recall Leslie Knope? Don't," but realizes she can just put the "Don't" in front of the sign. April takes the question mark stickers so she can put them on the end of "STOP" signs, causing Leslie to shout, "April, no!" | |
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Snopes examines the urban legend that a man sued the telegraph company (and won) after they omitted a single comma from his message. According to the story, his wife was on vacation and an expensive piece of jewelry caught her eye, so she sent a message asking if she could buy it. The man replied "No, price too high", but the telegraph operator instead sent the message "No price too high." | |
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A Tumblr post once analyzed that the popular phrase "Fuck bitches, get money" can develop many different meanings based on emphasis and punctuation. | |
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Eats, Shoots & Leaves teaches the difference between "eats, shoots and leaves" and "eats shoots and leaves". The panda does the former after either misreading a wildlife guide or reading a wildlife guide that included the comma after "eats". | |
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1066 and All That draws attention to the classic punctuation exercise, "Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off", pointing out how memorable that would be. The sentence should go, "Charles the First walked and talked; half an hour after, his head was cut off." | |
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: A "relationship tip" recommends clever comma placement to produce honest compliments. Lie: "You have a body like Adonis." Truth: "You have a body, like Adonis." | |
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There's an xkcd comic about mentally shifting the hyphen whenever someone refers to something as an "[adjective]-ass [noun]". For example, turning "sweet-ass car" into "sweet ass-car". | |
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The Flash: When Savitar says "I am the future, Flash." everyone thinks it's an I Am the Noun Badass Boast. He's actually telling them his identity "I am the future-Flash." As in, he's the Flash from the future. | |
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A cartoon from The New Yorker has a teacher object to a child's drawing subtitled "Happy Mothers' Day" instead of "Happy Mother's Day." The child clarifies that he has two moms. | |
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30 Rock: When Grizz and Dot Com show Tracy his birthday invitations, Tracy notices that they put "Give to charity please! No presents." on the invites. Dot Com says that that's what he told them to put on them. Tracy says that what he meant was "Give to charity? Please, no. Presents!" At one point Jack mentions that the first edition of a book he wrote had a typo. He said "By the end of this quarter, we're all gonna be in the black-comma-guys", not "We're all gonna be in the black guys." |
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Taskmaster: In the final stage task in Series 2, the instructions went: "Put on a pair of food-handling gloves, eat a whole banana, correctly put on a tie, and clap as many times as possible." After Katherine Ryan, the only female contestant that series, objected to "correctly put on a tie", the comma was moved after "correctly" to make: "Put on a pair of food-handling gloves, eat a whole banana correctly, put on a tie, and clap as many times as possible" so she wouldn't be at a disadvantage. | |
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Veep: During the Nevada recount in the fifth season, officials review a ballot with no vote but has "Fuck Selina Meyer" written over it. Selina's team is able to have the ballot counted for them by claiming the voter's intent was to say, "Fuck, Selina Meyer!" | |
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Red vs. Blue: In The Shisno Paradox, Huggins (a living ball of light) reports to Atlus. Atlus is at first disappointed about the contents of her report: | |
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Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the episode The Screaming Skull, after several jokes pointing out that the movie's heroine seems to do more screaming than the eponymous skull, Mike Nelson wonders if the movie was accidentally mistitled: | |
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Cow and Chicken: In "Major Wedgie", the eponymous Major goes on a tangent about how pausing at the right time can completely change the meaning of a sentence. | |
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Jonathan Creek: In "The Seer of the Sands", a man named Justin Mallory receives a letter from his girlfriend, who is trying to persuade her estranged husband to agree to a divorce. He reads: "Pressing Rex for a divorce again this morning. He said no, one would have to suffer much longer." This causes him to fly into a rage, get drunk, crash his boat and drown. Had he looked more closely, he would have realized that what he thought was a comma was actually a fly that had landed on the page, and she was actually telling him that Rex had agreed to the split. | |
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In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Shippening", Gumball uses a notebook that magically makes everything drawn/written in it a reality to write a story about Bobert, Tina, and Jamie. When he writes out, "Let's eat Bobert", Darwin asks, "Shouldn't there be a comma before 'Bobert'?" Cut to Tina and Jamie eating Bobert. | |
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Encyclopedia Brown: Tyrone was writing a love letter via dictation over the phone one word at a time, but the punctuation wasn't dictated and turned the message into an insulting letter. | |
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Discussed in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver when covering Chief Justice Roberts' comments on Obamacare, then bringing up a banner used to support the London women's soccer team — "Come On Our Girls!" — pointing out that it really could have used a comma. | |
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This can occasionally happen with trope names on TV Tropes, thanks to the custom title system which allows punctuation to be added to trope names without altering the URL. For instance, "Stop Having Fun" Guys was originally meant to be the kind of thing that type of person would say: "Stop having fun, guys!" But through custom titling, the name was changed to refer to the kind of people who have that attitude. Likewise, "The Reason You Suck" Speech could just as easily be titled The "Reason You Suck" Speech, which would make the trope an example of Spell My Name with a "The". | |
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In an episode of Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell received an invitation to a Christmas party from their friend that said, "No presents please." However, Mitchell ran into another friend who tells them that the card should be read, "No presents? Please!", meaning they need to bring presents. | |
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In the "Take a Break" number from Hamilton, Angelica notices that in Alexander's last letter to her she was addressed as "My Dearest, Angelica" rather than simply "My Dearest Angelica". | |
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Critical Role: Inverted in Campaign 2, where a lack of punctuation changes the meaning. Sam plays a goblin named Nott the Brave. As Nott explains to another character, who assumed she was courageous, "There's no comma. I'm not the brave." | |
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In one of the Anne of Green Gables books young Davy misinterprets a phrase in his catechism. "Why should we love God? Because he makes, preserves and redeems us." Davy misses the comma and believes that God makes jam ("Preserves is just a holy way of saying jam"). Anne must point out that the comma is important in the meaning. | |
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In a bit of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan art by Jargon Scott, Trixie wears a T-shirt with the message "NO FAT CHICKS". In the followup picture, Twilight objects to the shirt and tells Trixie to change it — and Trixie complies by adding a comma and exclamation mark: "NO, FAT CHICKS!" | |
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Doctor Who: There is an asteroid base that is initially assumed to be named "Demon's Run". As it turns out, it's actually "Demons Run". As in "Demons run when a good man goes to war." | |
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons: When a smug character gives you a gift to give to another villager, he tells you, "No rush", before he corrects himself, saying, "No, rush!" | |
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In an Eddsworld comic, Tom sees a sign on Edd's bedroom door reading "Edds Room" and remarks on the bad grammar. The room is actually full of clones of Edd. | |
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A 2019 Bizarro comic has the purveyor of a hot dog stand with the sign, "Sloppy Joe's Hot Dogs", explaining to someone pointing at the sign that his name is Sloppy Joe and that the apostrophe is correct. | |
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In Big Time Rush, the hotel manager tried to ban children and teens from swimming in the pool by putting up a sign: "Adult Swim No Kids Allowed." Kendall scribbled on the sign with a marker to make it say "Adult Swim? No, Kids Allowed!" so they can use the pool. | |
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In one episode of Family Guy Brian and Stewie go scuba diving, conversing with each other by writing on white boards with markers. At one point, after Brian corrects an error Stewie made, Stewie writes "Don't be a grammar shark." This confuses Brian, until he is attacked by a shark, causing Stewie to add the punctuation to his sentence, so it now reads "Don't be a grammar— Shark!" | |
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An episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was about a night club either called Spider's or Spiders. Their advertising wasn't consistent with the apostrophe use, causing Rebecca to wonder if it's a spider-infested club or a club owned by a spider. The sign in front of the club says Spider's. | |
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In the How I Met Your Mother episode, "The Scorpion and the Toad", Lily reports two versions of the opinion her art teacher gave her piece. The first, which gave a false impression, was, "Oh, my god. This is your best work. In all my years of teaching, I've never seen anything so... Needless to say, this is art! I can't teach you anything." The second, corrected version was "Oh, my god. This is your best work? In all my years of teaching, I've never seen anything so needless. To say this is... art... I can't teach you anything." | |
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The Electric Company (1971) has sketch about the importance of punctuation takes place in a courtroom. The plaintiff is a farmer who is charging a man who fished in his pond with trespassing and fishing in a posted no fishing zone. He holds up a sign that he had posted in the pond that says, "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO FISHING ALLOWED." He says he meant the sign to say "Private Property. No Fishing Allowed." The defendant says that since the sign had no punctuation, he assumed that it meant "Private Property? No, Fishing Allowed." | |
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