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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Criminal Sentence 307: Coffee with No Apostrophe

I didn't want to buy it, but it was the only coffee that met my requirements: dark roast and ground. It pained me to buy coffee that bragged this on the outside:

"A dark roast coffee lovers delight!"

Delightful taste but un-delightful punctuation.

2 comments:

Westley said...

I'm still confused. Is it a delight of 'dark roast coffee lovers'? Or is it a dark roast coffee that lovers delight in? (yuck)

I'm tending toward the former and would connect the compound adjective (modifying delight) with hyphens: "A dark-roast-coffee-lovers delight" but that just looks too complicated.

The Sentence Sleuth said...

You could add hyphens, as in A dark-roast-lover's delight.