Don't fear the seekers

If it ain't one comma thing, it's another. Here, the missing Donner Party creates yet another Halloween dilemma. Perhaps you had settled on going as Beautiful Clean Coal, rather than an open stylebook; now you have to add Job Seeker to your list of possible costumes. Alas, it appears the editors have already done so.

Thanks, as always, to Powderhorn for the share.

Shoot, the piano player!

Yes, that's been quite enough breathless promotion of the Stupidity Tax for the year, but even the dozenth lottery story of the week can contain a punctuation gem. Imagine, if you will, these sentences:

You can't win the lottery honestly.
You can't win the lottery, honestly!

... and then see if you still want to lay off all your copy editors.

Because these things never happen in a vacuum, there's also this rendition of the president's excuse-making for his desert friends:

Like, the thing about discourse markers, you know, is that sometimes, well, you get a really different meaning if you don't set them off with commas. (I know, right?) As in, he probably didn't mean "you know you're guilty"? Here's the AP's version:

“I think we have to find out what happened first,” Trump said. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.”

Treat commas right so they'll treat you. Right? Think of the Donner Party.