There or their? Your or you're? Too or to? It's and its?

Whenever I see signs like this one on Hillary's Beach in north Perth I wonder why the sign writers don’t go to the trouble of checking where there should and shouldn’t be apostrophes. At best it’s sloppy - if you don’t care about this what else don’t you care about? At worst it’s expensive.

Well, it is now for Oakhurst Dairy in Maine, USA. They face an overtime bill of about ￡8m after a group of truck drivers recently won a pay dispute that hinged on the lack of a comma in the overtime laws.

The lawyers will love this.

Maine's law says the following activities do not qualify for overtime pay: "The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods."

The drivers said the lack of a comma between "shipment" and "or distribution" meant the legislation applied only to the single activity of "packing", rather than to "packing" and "distribution" as two separate activities.

And because drivers distribute the goods, but do not pack them, they argued they were therefore eligible for overtime pay - backdated over several years.

And Judge David Barron agreed: "We conclude that the exemption's scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state's wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers' narrower reading of the exemption."

Oakhurst Dairy isn’t the first business to fall foul of punctuation problems, spelling mistakes and typos. 

I recall when I worked in advertising in Manchester the Evening News had brief pen pictures of the tele sales people in the newspaper each day. Head and shoulders photo and a paragraph on the particular individual. A nice touch.

But one young woman wasn’t too happy when she said she had come back to work at the M.E.N. after having a baby as she ‘missed her daily contact with the pubic.’ 

Just an ‘l’ between the ‘b’ and the ‘i’ would have saved her blushes.

And my reputation in Harrogate was improved no end in 2001 when a photo appeared of me in the ‘Yorkshire Post’ alongside a piece on my agency announcing its annual results with annual billings of ￡486m instead of ￡48.6m.

There or their? Your or you're? Too or to? It's and its?