The punctuation of poker

The Hilton recently acquired a new board for displaying its high-hand jackpots. Today was the first time since it was installed that I sat at the table closest to it. That allowed me to notice something I hadn't seen from across the room: 13 erroneous apostrophes, a sampling of which can be seen in the photograph. (Yeah, yeah, yeah: I used my cell phone in the poker room to take a picture. So sue me!)

Hey, Hilton staff: I love you guys--I really do. But somebody there should have checked a punctuation usage guide (or just asked anybody with a little editing experience) before shelling out the bucks to have this 13-fold blunder custom-made into big lettering.

No matter how often one sees it done (and it is painfully frequent these days), apostrophes are not used to indicate plurals--with rare exceptions.* "Jack" and "queen" and "king" and "ace" are ordinary words, and just as in this paragraph I didn't write "apostrophe's" or "plural's" or "exception's" or "word's," it's wrong, wrong, wrong to have "Jack's," "Queen's," "King's," and "Ace's" up there on your jackpot board.

Using an apostrophe to make the plural of a numeral (e.g., "8's") isn't as obviously wrong, but it's still wrong, or, at best, unnecessary. It works just fine to write "8s."

Don't believe me? Check any style guide in print, or these online ones:

http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/a.htm#apostrophe
and
http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/p.htm#plurals

http://www.write101.com/W.Tips137.htm
and
http://www.write101.com/W.Tips138.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/68/50/4650.html

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/pizza?view=uk

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/apostrophes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Use_in_forming_certain_plurals

and about a zillion other similar works available at the click of a mouse. (This isn't exactly obscure information.)

For a delightful book-length rant on the modern misuse of punctuation, and why it matters, pick up a copy of Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She has a whole chapter on the poor, abused apostrophe.

Does it matter? Well, yes and no. It's certainly true that nobody looking at the sign will be left wondering about the basic meaning, just because there are a few extra punctuation marks. But it matters in the sense of showing that one doesn't care about getting things right.

Let me suggest a poker analogy. It is common for card room novices to mix up the terms "bet" and "raise" and "re-raise." For example, the first person to act after the flop will sometimes say "raise" before putting in a bet. To experienced ears, this sounds like a musician hitting a wrong note. There is no previous bet to raise. Sometimes the dealer will even point out the error, saying something like, "You can't raise, because there has been no prior bet on this round. But you can bet if you'd like." Sometimes they'll just mercifully let it go in silence. There is no serious problem with anybody mistaking the newbie's intention, but it's just plain wrong to announce "raise" in that situation.

Similarly, everybody looking at this sign will understand perfectly well what it's saying. But people with experience using written language according to the traditional rules will immediately notice the errors. It's just as jarring as hearing poker terms used incorrectly at the table. In both cases, it show carelessness, and/or an unfamiliarity with the basic tools and components of the relevant language. I don't think that's an image one would want to project. So I'm going to be like the dealer who gently corrects a green player's misunderstanding of terminology.

To the Hilton poker room staff: You might check to see if the printer will make up a new sign for you without 13 punctuation errors on it. Otherwise, I might have to sneak in there some time when the room is dark, with my bottle of Wite-Out.

*See, e.g., http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/Plurals/Plurals06.html.

Addendum, September 12, 2007

Some poker rooms offer a progressive jackpot to the loser of a pot in which one very strong hand beats another strong hand. In an advertisement in this week's edition of Card Player magazine, the Hustler Casino in Gardena, CA, mentions that their so-called "bad beat jackpot" requirement is "Aces' Full of Ten's Beaten by Four-of-a-Kind or Better."

Within the same advertisement, however, they correctly make various other plural nouns: "games," "cards," "details," and "rules." I cannot fathom why somebody there--probably more than one person, given how many people are typically involved in writing and laying out a full-page ad--thinks that there is something different about "aces" and "tens." Morons, every one of them.