Unforgivable! Shame! Go sit in the corner!

The ad shown here was on a page I was reading this morning. One thing about it caught my eye—the odd line between people and ready. The phrase people-ready would be correct. On most computer keyboards, the hyphen (-) and the underline (_) are on the same key. The difference is the hyphen doesn’t require the use of the Shift key, but the underline does. It makes me think the keyboardist in this case must have thought the longer line above the hyphen on the key is a super-sized hyphen, which would be a cool thing to use. Not noticing that he/she got an underline instead of a super hyphen, the ad went through its usual series of checks and approvals before being sent out the door.

Some little guy putting together a daily blog might make such a silly goof. Most bloggers don’t have a fact-checking division populated by archivists, historians, and nit pickers, nor do they have high-paid high-educated high-self-esteemed proofreaders. Microsoft has all those people on staff to catch mis-spoken-nesses, unless they’re among the first to be laid off when times get tough.

The object of the ad is to get the reader to check out the article, Navigating a Turbulent Economy. The tag line at the bottom, “Because it’s everybody’s business,” seems odd, since it wasn’t everybody’s business at Microsoft to catch the underline-posing-as-a-hyphen.