If you don’t give a hoot about grammatical errors, then save yourself the time and do not finish the rest of this column or just read anyway and you might get a few laughs.

Unfortunately for me, I have been cursed with discovering spelling and word usage mistakes wherever I go. Grading high school essays for 38 years contributed to my terminal condition.

I would give my students this example as to why good grammar matters. I went into a Pizza Hut years ago and a blackboard sign read, “Meatball sandwhich special today!” I politely informed the counter clerk of the misspelling of “sandwich,” unaware that the manager had overheard me. He came over and said, “We don’t care about spelling here. We are a restaurant and we make food. Now what can we do to serve you?”

I turned around and walked out.

“Why did you walk out?” my students would say. “So what if they can’t spell. That has nothing to do with the food.”

“I disagree,” I replied. “It’s not that the word was misspelled. In the first place, he didn’t pay attention to a small detail and then he didn’t care enough to fix it. Can anyone in the class tell me what his attitude about spelling does have to do with the food?”

I would always get a student to give me this answer. “If he doesn’t care enough to fix the spelling, then what makes you think he pays attention to the small details of cooking the food or care enough to fix a problem with the food when there is one?”

So I would always tell my students if you write a paper filled with grammatical errors, the reader will never appreciate your content because he is constantly distracted by all your mistakes. If an artist creates a beautiful painting, but puts the canvas inside a cheap plastic frame, people will be distracted from the artwork and shake their heads about the frame.

We posted a “Grammar Police” bulletin board in my classroom and I would give my students extra credit if they brought in violations to display. Here are some examples that I can remember.

Signs were posted in the gym of our high school. A circle with a diagonal line across the words inside read, “No food or drinks in the gym.” Some students would see nothing wrong. Then one would look and say, “The circle with the line through the middle means no, don’t do it. But the words say no food or drink. So the sign is really saying no to no food or drinks. That means yes. It’s a double negative so you can bring food and drinks into the gym.”

There were funny and embarrassing errors on the board. A convenience store had posted a job on the sign outside. It read, “Closer wanted. Inquire within.” Well the “C” from “closer had been removed somehow, so for weeks, the sign read, “loser wanted. Inquire within.”

Other public signs make you laugh and shake your head, too. The funny part is interpreted from a grammatical usage error or a spelling mistake. You shake your head because someone paid money to have a sign printed and both the buyer and the sign maker never saw the mistake and corrected it.

Here’s a parking lot sign. “Violators will be towed and find $50.”

How about this sign in a furniture store. “Our beds come with free one night stand.” I wonder if this one was done intentionally, just like “Shoplifters will be prostituted.”

I found this next example. It’s not a grammatical error, but it certainly made me laugh. A large business sign read “Public Storage” and it was placed right next to a cemetery in Whitehall.

Writers are often careless about punctuation marks, especially commas. I would correct essays totally void of commas and then I’d find one where it seemed that every sentence was marred with five or six of these little pause curls.

Well, who cares about commas, you might say. They don’t affect the meaning of what you’re trying to say. Oh no? Here’s a classic example written with and without a comma.

“Let’s eat, Grandpa.”

“Let’s eat Grandpa.”

When someone asks me why so many people don’t care about correct grammar, I answer appropriately.

“I don’t know nothin’ no more.”

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.