Pet Peeves - The Upside Down Eight

I'm a man of many opinions, some might say too many, and stashed away in that peanut brain of mine is a litany of pet peeves. One of my favourites is the gas station upside down eight. By the way, I gave up clinging to referring to gas stations as petrol stations a few years ago. Some battles are futile and when it comes to how one refers to the location where one procures fuel for one's vehicle it's best to adopt the "when in Rome" approach. For the record I still call aluminium "aluminium". The fact that America persists in referring to that particular metal as "aluminum" hints at a cockup as vast and as far reaching as the one that instituted the use of the word "entre" as an umbrella term for the main course instead of the starters. You'd think that the translation of the word from the French would have given the progenitor of that mistake a decent idea about its intended use.

Anyway, so I hate upside down eights on gas station pricing signs. The little loop goes on the top, the big loop goes on the bottom. It's not hard to sort out. Just take a look at the number: little loop top; big loop bottom. If you can't work something as simple as that out then there's probably a whole raft of other aspects of your life that are seemingly simple to most but confound you at every turn.

And I won't hear any of those "we're free to be creative with our use of language" arguments either. Those sorts of arguments usually come from people who can't muddle their way through the use of such newly dispensable stuff as, um, grammar and punctuation. Hey, if it's too tough to work out just jettison it wholesale and write the exercise off as an act of creativity. Guess what, folks, you have to know the rules before you break 'em. James Joyce knew how to handle direct quotes before he resorted to that whole hyphen thing.