But what I found is it distracted me enough that I lost sight of the bigger picture immediately. It didn’t accomplish keeping it stuck in my mind, other than the error. But the focus should ultimately be making me remember Touringplans.com, not a grammatical hiccup.
What’s back at me? There’s no “grammatical hiccup” here and nothing is “incorrect”. Just because your brain wasn’t “spoon fed” the citation or didn’t like how it was being displayed doesn’t make it automatically wrong.
There is no standard when displaying a quote and a citation alone, beyond a clear separation of quote and citation.
Now, all that said… again, I have no problem putting the hyphen back in. So I’m not sure why you’re getting all hyper-focused on whether or not it SHOULD be there vs whether or not I can put it back.
Edit: I just pulled these quotes randomly, I didn’t even read them, so sorry if they are offensive? Though it doesn’t look like any should be?
Hey y’all! Millennial here! @Randall1028’s shirt is totally fine with just the hyphen (or none) and he is not the first person to use this format (with no “said”). It’s a widely understood format.
No offense intended to anyone who thinks otherwise, just offering my perspective!
I wasn’t the first to be bothered by it. But I am bothered by it as well. It isn’t even about the visual formatting, but about the fact that “said no one ever” is a meme thing, and a spoken one at that. The play on words people expect is for the “said” to be there because that’s what people say. They don’t say it without the said.
I think dropping the said for the hyphen still can work, but only because seeing the hyphen visually causes your brain to kind of read it as “said”. Without the hyphen, it becomes nothing but an attribution. That works if it is an actual quote. This isn’t a quote at all. It is an anti quote (if that’s a thing) because you are highlighting what someone DOESN’T say.
Which brings it back to sticking to the language people expect to hear. This is a “said no one ever” joke.
Which brings me back to the hiccup. As a writer, the idea is you don’t ever want the reader to be caught up by the way it is written. In this case, that is exactly what has happened. And while there are times you might actually want to do that on purpose, as you already said, in this case it becomes a distraction not something that emphasizes the humor.
Now, if you did this up like it was some fancy quote similar to the ones you posted, where it is meant to appear inspirational and quoting someone famous…THEN the juxtaposition would add to the effect. In this case, being as plain as it is, it appeals to the spoken joke…which needs the said.
Here are some examples of other memes and products that use “- No One Ever” as the attribution. (It’s hard to do a search for something that doesn’t say “said” but I’ve seen it many times.)