THIS IS CERTAIN TO COST SOMEBODY MONEY.

Their disruptiveness is vexing when you are trying to create high art for a consumer’s pleasure, such as, say, a learned newspaper column. Usually they do not cost anyone money or alter history.

But it is possible. The most famous instance in the English-speaking world is the U.S. government’s reformed Tariff Act of 1872. Congress intended to put tropical “fruit-plants” on the national “free list” of goods that could be imported without taxation. Some careless clerk, whose descendants I think I have run into, replaced the hyphen with a comma. This seemingly put tropical fruit and tropical plants on the free list separately.

For a couple of years the federal Treasury taxed imported oranges and lemons as Congress had intended, but the secretary eventually decided that honour required a refund to the fruit importers. The missing hyphen was restored to the tariff schedule, but the U.S. was on the hook for more than one per cent of all tariff revenue collected during the period of crisis. This was before income tax, when tariffs were the federal government’s core revenue source.

In 2017, editors are rejoicing at the news that our century now has its very own “fruit-plants” controversy: the myth of the costly comma has been renewed for future generations. The scene of the action is the state of Maine, where the law requires most businesses to pay employees timeand-a-half