Punctuation

A friend sent me this article on the decline of punctuation in British place names just after it took me at least five attempts to send an e-check to the Smith Club of Washington for some pecans. ING apparently only lets one use periods and hyphens in the memo to the recipient... which is really, really hard to do. I kept on taking out all the other punctuation that I thought I'd used... only to keep getting the error message and having to go back and find more. I had to replace commas with em dashes and sometimes ellipses, and wrote out contractions because I couldn't use apostrophes. I felt like I was writing with my hands tied behind my back.

Then again, if your country is full of place names like Butt's hole (see post from about a week ago), I can see how Butts hole would be an improvement.