Since it’s not always easy to toss out punctuation as not “part of the English language,” it’s really no wonder that entire cases regularly revolve around one tiny punctuation mark. In Ohio, a woman gets out of a parking ticket because of a forgotten comma. In the Philippines, the result of a mayoral election is voided because the court chooses to disregard a “semi-colon which the appellant views with a respect bordering on fetishism.”* Cases like these are a dime a dozen. But the stakes have sometimes been much higher than traffic tickets or cocktails after 11:00 P.M. or even election
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