Ohio Boy Accidentally Buried by Snow Plow OK

My message of 30 October 2006 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, at least in my mind, the importance of proper and orderly punctuation in all our lives, or, at the very least, in all our sentences. Responses that I have subsequently received to that message from a number of "regular readers" (in my dreams) have suggested, in the nicest possible ways, that The Referee perhaps tends towards the affliction of punctuation anorakism. This is, as far as I can tell, a specific and acute strain of the more general and common affliction of grammar anorakism, although perhaps one can have both simultaneously. I certainly hope so.

Anyway, bouyed by these generous compliments, I am proud to present the second message in an ad hoc series that might be entitled something along the lines of The Referee's Guide to the Importance of Proper and Orderly Punctuation in All Our Lives.

In researching this series on your behalf, dear reader, I have noticed that the "tabloid" media is particularly helpful in providing examples that spotlight the importance of good punctuation, if I may have your permission to use "spotlight" as a verb for a moment. (It won't happen again.)

I'm not sure why this should be so; perhaps it's because the more low-brow media tend to pack as much meaning as possible into breathless headlines, so as to grab the attention, and/or to be able to keep the accompanying article as short as possible.

Whatever the reason for it, my attention was caught recently by a headline on foxnews.com - and the brow doesn't get a lot lower than that - about a young man in Ohio who fortunately walked away unscathed after a rather wintry scare. In fact, after having gone unnoticed by a frozen precipitation removal operative, his plight was reported by a friend, and he was then whisked away to a hospital, where he was declared unharmed and not in need of admission.

So, all's well that ends well, and there was apparently no more to the story than that.

If only the same could be said for the headline, which has almost as many words as did the story; and, if you sit back and look at them, those words seem to be scrambling over each other in a desperate attempt to blurt out the span of the whole story before the edge of the page turns up to spoil the party.

These seem to be perfect conditions for multiple potential meanings and nuances, and therefore ideal circumstances for demonstrating the importance of proper and orderly punctuation.

This time, however, I'm not going to mollycoddle you (and it's not often enough, I'm sure you'll agree, that we see the word mollycoddle these days). No. Because you, I surmise, are an educated reader who requires no stabilisers in order to navigate the rocky terrain of punctuation.

And so, without further ado, I give you a few alternatively-punctuated versions of the same headline.

1. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow plow OK.
2. Ohio: boy accidentally buried by snow plow; OK?
3. "Ohio Boy", accidentally buried by snow plow, OK.
4. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow. Plow OK.

There may be others.

You're on your own.

I expect you can almost feel the wind of punctuation blowing through your hair...