One Comma Turned a Lost Boy’s Police Bulletin Into a Station-House Joke
A five-year-old lost and found at the Seattle police station became a lesson in punctuation when a missing comma made his uncle sound like a man named John Chestnut.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
For a while yesterday afternoon everyone who took a look at the bulletins at the police station invariably read out loud the following: “Sent home with his uncle John Chestnut.” This followed the announcement that little David Green, aged 5 years, had been lost and found. Clerk Kennedy looked up as the reporter read the line and said: “You are the hundredth man who has read that that way. Let me see it.” Then he put in a comma, made a little mark, and it read as follows: “Sent home with his uncle, John and Chestnut streets.”
“You are the hundredth man who has read that that way. Let me see it.”
The item is a reminder that public notices have always been vulnerable to a misplaced comma — and that a little punctuation can turn an ordinary police bulletin into a running joke. In an age of social-media edits and OCR errors, the same comedy of misreading is familiar.
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