A PO box in the USA

Punctuation mania went out of vogue 200 years ago.

http://missingmanuals.com/pogues_awesome_iphone_typing_shortcut.csp

Get It Try It

This represents a major breakthrough. After all even Daring Phuchoal is covering it. David Pogue has namely been made privy to a hottt secret about the iPhone keyboard. By one Andrew McCallum.

The scenario is you want to add punctuation to a sentence. Given the tiny real estate of the iPhone keyboard layout you have the alphanumeric on one keyboard and the punctuation on another so you have to keep switching between keyboards. A real bitch.

As an example of how grueling this can be David Pogue gives you the task of typing in the following phrase.

A P.O. Box in the U.S.A.

And thereby blows it. For nowhere but in the US are people going to bother with such silliness.

Anywhere else - check the Guardian or the Times or any news site of any sophisticated country - it's the following.

A PO box in the USA.

Note 'box' is not capitalised because that's just stupid and you've eliminated four out of five full stops - and have one only at the end of the sentence as it should be.

Steve Jobs and Apple are trying to get people in the US to grow up. Now if he and they can just get-them to stop hyphenating all-over-the-place. And get them to understand that 'uh' and 'um' are not real words. [That can be difficult: weak minds are notoriously stubborn and resistant to therapy.]

It used to be English. Once upon a time it was English. Now it's little more than a fucking joke. Like the country where it's written.