Reporter #1 sends in this snapshot she took, explaining that “For those of us who live in Tim Hortons country, it’s that festive time of year called Rrroll up the Rrrrim to Win!”  She also mentions that “since I haven’t ‘won’ so much as a free coffee, I can’t really speak to what this means.”

We’ll discuss further below.

Now I immediately shared Reporter #1’s annoyance at all the quotation marks flying left and right.  Then it occurred to me that if the tabs did, in fact, say “Winning” on them, then these rules are just quoting.  So I actually found the contest website (you can play online!) and checked, and it turns out they actually say “WIN.”  So if this is correct, it’s on a very technical point.  And also, it’s annoying.  Are they winning tabs or are the prizes kind of sucky?  Which is it?

Now I’d like to talk about two things that are TOTALLY MORE OUTRAGEOUS.  First of all, the chain was named after a dude called Tim Horton.  I checked.  I’m not a professional researcher for nothing, people.  How hugely annoying is their massive lack of an apostrophe in their own name?  Why doesn’t this fact bother every right-thinking Canadian?  Eh?

Secondly, I mean, I know what Tim Hortons is because I have a television and it’s kind of a running joke about Canada, like Atlanta and Waffle House.  But Reporter #1, as we have previously noted, lives in Buffalo.  Looks to me like Buffalo has to get its national priorities straight.  Are you too good for Starbucks and Caribou Coffee, Buffalo?  Why do you hate America?

I could make several individual posts out of the pictures I took at a single store this weekend.  But I won’t, because that feels like cheating.  So here we go.

The best part about this one was that it was a copy.  They’d copied it and posted it all over one end of the store, an exuberant festival of abused apostrophes and quotation marks.

I’m willing to give points for consistency.  If you want to argue that you’re going to just preface every single “s” with an apostrophe — I mean, you’d be wrong, but at least you’d be consistent.  Similarly if you argued that pluralization should occur with apostrophes: still wrong, but some points.  I’d even accept an (incorrect) argument that nouns that end in the singular with a vowel, like “sample,” require an apostrophe for pluralization, whereas those ending with consonants don’t.  But why on earth would you pluralize “sample” and “cap” with an apostrophe and NOT “box”?