Grammar Donkeys

OK, it's a cute ad, and I get the point: You will no longer be a donkey if you pay CardRunners a whole bunch of money to teach you to play poker better.

But how many people at their organization, their ad agency, and at Bluff magazine (where I found this advertisement) failed to notice that they used "it's" where they should have had "its"?

Does it make any sense to say "It wants it is donkey back"? No, of course not. But that's what they've made it say.

They are Grammar Donkeys.

If these people are so smart, why can't they properly apply something so basic that they presumably learned it in about 6th grade? Why would I trust them to be experts on anything? If you don't know the language well enough to write ad copy, then for Pete's sake hire somebody who does.

By the way, for those of you who, like me, enjoy poking fun at the world of Grammar Donkeys, here's a whole blog devoted just to documenting apostrophe abuse: http://www.apostropheabuse.com/. And yes, I'll be sending them a link to this post.

(I almost had the title of this post as "Grammer donkeys." How embarrassing would that have been? Fortunately, I caught it in time. Still, writing a fairly high volume every day, and working without an editor, it's inevitable that spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors will creep into these posts from time to time, despite my best efforts--and despite the fact that I really do know the rules of the language well enough. So just in case somebody is tempted to call me a hypocrite because of a mistake you find herein, consider the difference between one guy, working for free, pumping out what are for the most part first-draft thoughts, two or three times a day on average, for the entertainment of a fairly small number of readers, and a commercial enterprise, working for weeks or months through a professional ad agency and one of the top magazines in its field, with teams of writers and editors, trying hard to make something eye-catching and persuasive enough that lots of readers will send them lots of money, yet all missing something so fundamental. It's just not the same.)