chicken period billboard toronto

Grammar mistake is getting Toronto chicken restaurant's billboard roasted

The simple omission of a comma is all it took to turn a restaurant's boastful claim about having the best chicken into a sequence of words with a very different meaning.

Whoever designed this Toronto billboard made a small grammatical error that has had far-reaching reactions online, the advertisement's typo going viral on Twitter after being posted to the platform on Sunday afternoon.

Clearly meant to say "Toronto's best chicken, period," the sign for Portuguese restaurant Churrasqueira Martins left out the oh-so-important comma in the sentence, in what instead appears to be an accidental claim that the restaurant is the city's premier location for…gallus domesticus menstruation?

Like their chicken, Martins is now the subject of roasting, commenters pointing out that chicken periods sort of/technically/probably might scientifically exist in the form of eggs. A marketing strategy egg farmers will likely not be adopting any time soon.

And the title of "best chicken period" is one that some rightly believe should go to a breakfast or even brunch spot due to this biologically questionable comparison to eggs.

It's a reminder that punctuation can be the difference between getting your message across versus being a laughing stock. And it isn't always a comma, as one commenter pointed out how a missing hyphen can be even worse.

One commenter argues that another period, and not a comma, is actually the correct way to phrase this statement. But then wouldn't it just say "Toronto's best chicken (period) period."?

Still funny but not getting quite as much attention is the fact that the sign places an actual period after the word "period," which you're understandably not going to notice while hung up on the more jarring typo.

So for all the marketing teams and graphic designers out there, always remember to proofread for punctuation before you scream about chicken periods with large billboards.

Lead photo by

Churrasqueira Martins


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