Missing Apostrophe in Australian Facebook Post Lands a Man in Defamation Court

[maestrob]

An Australian man claimed a real estate agent did not pay its “employees” retirement funds. The lack of a punctuation mark may cost him thousands.


By Livia Albeck-Ripka
Oct. 11, 2021
Updated 10:18 a.m. ET

A missing apostrophe in a Facebook post could cost a real estate agent in Australia tens of thousands of dollars after a court ruled a defamation case against him could proceed.

In the post last year, Anthony Zadravic, the agent, appears to accuse Stuart Gan, his former employer at a real estate agency, of not paying retirement funds to all the agency’s workers.

At issue is the word “employees” in the post, which read: “Oh Stuart Gan!! Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation,” referring to Australia’s retirement system, in which money is paid by employers into super accounts for employees. “Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!”

Less than 12 hours after the post was published on Oct. 22, Mr. Zadravic, who is based on the Central Coast in New South Wales, deleted it. But it was too late. Mr. Gan became aware of the message and filed a defamation claim against Mr. Zadravic.

On Thursday, a judge in New South Wales ruled that the lack of an apostrophe on the word “employees” could be read to suggest a “systematic pattern of conduct” by Mr. Gan’s agency rather than an accusation involving one employee. So she allowed the case to proceed.

Neither Mr. Zadravic’s lawyers nor Mr. Gan immediately responded to requests for comment.

In matters of punctuation, social media is the Wild West. In some corners of the internet, careless grammar is highly tolerated — even a badge of honor. In legal matters, however, disputed punctuation can cost millions.

One recent case in Portland, Me., involving overtime for truck drivers hinged on the lack of an Oxford comma — the often-skipped final comma in a series like “A, B, and C” — in state law. The case, settled in 2018 for $5 million, gained international notoriety when the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the missing comma created enough uncertainty to side with the drivers. It gave grammar obsessives and those who adore the Oxford comma a chance to revel in the victory.

The tussle over a punctuation mark no larger than a pinhead comes in a country that has earned a reputation as the defamation capital of the world. Legal experts say the case of the missing apostrophe is far from surprising in Australia, which has a complex web of defamation laws and a history of rewarding plaintiffs large sums of money.

In 2019, for example, the Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush was awarded more than $2 million in his defamation case against Rupert Murdoch’s Nationwide News, the largest such payout at the time to a single person in Australian history. That same year, a billionaire businessman won a defamation case against a news organization that he claimed had wrongly linked him to a bribery case.

Court documents suggest that Mr. Zadravic appeared to have meant to add an apostrophe. After all, who hasn’t mangled grammar in firing off a social media post in a fit of pique?

But the judge, Judith Gibson, wrote in her statement: “​​The difficulty for the plaintiff is the use of the word ‘employees’ in the plural. To fail to pay one employee’s superannuation entitlement might be seen as unfortunate; to fail to pay some or all of them looks deliberate.”

Judge Gibson noted that the trial could cost Mr. Zadravic more than $180,000, and cited similar cases, including that of an Australian vet who was awarded more than $18,000 after a former client posted defamatory reviews online. In the latest case, it was not immediately clear what kind of recourse Mr. Gan had requested from the court.

High-profile defamation cases represent only a small fraction of the claims brought before Australian courts each year.

“The courts are awash with claims,” said Barrie Goldsmith, a special counsel with Rostron Carlyle Rojas Lawyers. A Sydney-based lawyer who has been working on defamation cases for more than three decades, he added that such claims would not be feasible in the United States, where the First Amendment protects freedom of speech.

Australia’s notoriously strict defamation laws have been criticized by members of the local news media. A 2018 survey by the Australian journalists’ union found that almost a quarter of respondents said they’d had a news article spiked that year because of fears of defamation claims.

Though the dispute in the case of the Facebook post by the real estate agent turns on a missing apostrophe, for others, misusing the punctuation is, in fact, tantamount to a crime.

According to Lynne Truss in her book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”: “No matter that you have a Ph.D and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, ‘Good food at it’s best’, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/worl ... -no-dedupe

[barney]

Have to feel sorry for the defendant, who was probably justiably aggrieved and now will be more so. That's if his super wasn't paid. Super in Australia is part of your salary - you and your employer put in equal amounts. It then goes into funds that invest it.

Re superannuation, when I joined the Age in 1981 they were one of the few companies that made super compulsory (it's now Government-mandated). I will never cease to be grateful - thanks to their foresight, by the time I retired I did not need to worry about money. Well, actually I haven't retired yet, but it's not far off.

I ordered myself a T-shirt from the US earlier this year, design your own message. It reads:
Let's eat kids
Let's eat, kids
Punctuation saves lives

[maestrob]

Great t-shirt!

I fell on the floor when I read Lynn Truss's statement in the last line of the article.

I agree with her 100%.

It's appalling, but I see typos in the N. Y. Times and in the crawl on CNN nearly every day. One of the most frequent offenders is CNN, where they write "capital" instead of "capitol" quite often.

I really don't think our generation was quite so careless.

[barney]

You're right Brian. When I started at The Age in 1981, my copy was read by a copy taster (to assess its general value), a news editor, a page editor, a sub-editor, a check sub-editor and a proof reader. Today it would get a news editor and sub-editor if I were lucky, plus, of course, spell check. No one's fault, just the way journalism has changed. But spell check is very unreliable.
There were plent of journos who were gramatically clueless back in 1981, but far more chances to correct them. I had the honour of teaching grammar to both sub-editors and theology students (who needed a basic understanding to tackle Greek or Hebrew). Neither had been taught it at school.

[maestrob]

You're right Brian. When I started at The Age in 1981, my copy was read by a copy taster (to assess its general value), a news editor, a page editor, a sub-editor, a check sub-editor and a proof reader. Today it would get a news editor and sub-editor if I were lucky, plus, of course, spell check. No one's fault, just the way journalism has changed. But spell check is very unreliable.
There were plent of journos who were gramatically clueless back in 1981, but far more chances to correct them. I had the honour of teaching grammar to both sub-editors and theology students (who needed a basic understanding to tackle Greek or Hebrew). Neither had been taught it at school.

I find your last sentence astounding!

When I was in high school, we spent an entire year focused on diagramming sentences. We were drilled and tested repeatedly on direct objects, indirect objects, proper use and placement of prepositions, the difference between "him and me" and "me and him," etc. Not to mention "You and I" vs. "you and me."

Intelligent young people today seem to take pride in careless spelling and grammar, as if it were some sort of badge of honor to be ignorant.

I just don't understand that.

[maestrob]

A Century-Long ‘Reign of Error’ for a Supreme Court Typo

A sweeping statement in a 1928 opinion about property rights was revised soon after it was issued. But the error lived on.

By Adam Liptak
Oct. 18, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

“When we issue an opinion, we are aware that every word that we write can have consequences, sometimes enormous consequences,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said last month. “So we have to be careful about every single thing that we say.”

A fascinating new study of the extraordinary impact of a tiny typographical error in a Supreme Court opinion almost a century ago illustrates the point.

The mistake appeared in a slip opinion issued in 1928, soon after the court announced a decision in a zoning dispute. It contained what seemed like a sweeping statement about the constitutional stature of property rights: “The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is property within the protection of the Constitution.”

But the author of the opinion, Justice Pierce Butler, had not meant to write “property.” He meant to say “properly.”

Slip opinions are preliminary and subject to editing. They are eventually supplanted by the authoritative versions in hardcover books.

The court eventually fixed the mistake, and this is what appears in the final version of the opinion published in book form in United States Reports: “The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is properly within the protection of the Constitution.”

Though the opinion was amended, the court did not draw attention to the change and the correction went unnoticed in much of the legal world.

The wrong version of the statement has appeared in at least 14 court decisions, the most recent of which was issued last year; in at least 11 appellate briefs; in a Supreme Court argument; and in books and articles.

Michael Allan Wolf, a law professor at the University of Florida who discovered the mistake and traced its history in the new article, to be published in The Washington University Law Review, said it was the worst sort of typographical error.

“It is a real word,” Professor Wolf said in an interview. “It makes sense in context. And it changes the meaning.”

He said it was impossible to know whether the incorrect statement affected the outcome in the cases in which judges considered or cited it.

“We’ll never know the answer to that,” he said, “though if we have judges who favor the private property owner at the expense of the government, I think it could be more than just icing on the cake.”

In all, though, Professor Wolf said, the oft-cited mistake served to amplify one view of property rights.


“It gave an additional argument to the private property rights movement,” he said. “And they have been very successful almost every time in pushing new theories. And this is a big one, because it supports the almost commonly held notion that you have a right to do on your property what is reasonable.”

“That’s not the way it works,” he said. “The way it works is that the government has the right to place reasonable restrictions on your use of property. I know it’s subtle, but that’s a big difference.”

The 1928 typo, Professor Wolf wrote, has “spawned a legacy of misrepresentations” and given rise to “a reign of error.”

The court’s practice of editing its opinions after they were issued without public notice, one it has now abandoned, was long a subject of internal criticism.

By making a “considerable number of corrections and editorial changes in the court’s opinions after their announcement and prior to their publication in the United States Reports,” a court official wrote to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in 1984, “we actually operate a system that is completely at odds with general publishing practices.”

In an internal memorandum in 1981, Justice Harry A. Blackmun said the court operated “on a strange and ‘reverse’ basis, where the professional editing is done after initial public release.”

These days, the Supreme Court is much better about publicizing its errors.

That is a consequence of changes instituted by the court in response to a 2014 article by Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, who disclosed that the justices had long been revising their opinions without public notice, sometimes amending or withdrawing legal conclusions.

Starting in 2015, the court has been noting revisions on its website. Of the 22 decisions in argued cases issued in June, for instance, eight required revisions, resulting in 30 separate changes.

The opinions in Fulton v. Philadelphia, a major decision on gay rights and religion issued in June, were changed three times to make 10 alterations. Most of them were in Justice Alito’s concurring opinion.

Professor Lazarus called the court’s new transparency a welcome development, adding that the volume of revisions was a good sign.

“They’re doing much better in being willing to acknowledge their mistakes,” he said of the justices. “Indeed, the fact that they have to acknowledge them probably makes them more careful. I think there would be more mistakes being made if they didn’t acknowledge them.”

Mistakes may still go uncorrected, though, in legal databases and other secondary materials. In an immigration case in April, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch initially wrote that the government must provide some immigrants with “a single complaint document explaining what it intends to do and when.” He revised the sentence the next day, having meant to write “compliant document.”

The error lives on, though, in the online archives maintained by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute and in a summary description of the case on Lexis, a legal database.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/us/p ... sions.html