This magnificently insane comma usage was discovered upon my most recent trip to Windy Harbour, my local chippy in south Manchester.

I can’t fault their heavenly chips or their wonderfully crisp battered cod, but what possessed them here? As if this scatterbrain punctuation wasn’t enough, when I then slumped against the counter to recover my breath I was faced with this on the menu board:

The spelling. Why not just copy the word ’sausage’ from the entry above? And yes, those really are “unnecessary quotation marks” encompassing the word ‘batterd’. Perhaps my chipmonger was batterd on booze when he did it. It’s the only rational explanation.