1234. This week, we look at how small writing errors in proposed laws have cost millions of dollars and knocked whole measures off the ballot. Then, we look at the nautical origin of "batten down the hatches."
1234. This week, we look at how small writing errors in proposed laws have cost millions of dollars and knocked whole measures off the ballot. Then, we look at the nautical origin of "batten down the hatches."
The "batten down the hatches" segment was by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
A hearty thank-you to our Keepers of the Commas and one mysterious Immortal on Patreon. We appreciate your support!
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about how tiny writing mistakes in ballot measures have changed what the law appears to say, and then we'll look at where the phrase "batten down the hatches" comes from.
But before we get started, I have a newsletter that I almost never tell you about, but that you'd probably enjoy. Every week, I send out a short writing tip, links to both the episodes that week, and a link to something completely unrelated that I happened to enjoy. You can subscribe by going to quickanddirtytips.com. And then, in the upper right, there's an icon that just kind of looks like a dark rectangle, but click on that, and it'll go to the subscribe page. And we'll put that link in the show notes too.
by Mignon Fogarty
It’s election day in the United States, which means we've all been reading a lot of voter guides (or at least I hope you have … be informed, people!). So today, we’re going to look at why good writing matters — a lot — in these often boring documents.
Let’s start with a decimal point.
In 2006, Arizona voters considered Proposition 203, which was supposed to fund early-childhood programs by increasing the cigarette tax. The backers meant to raise the tax by 80 cents per pack.
But the ballot's explanation of what a "yes" vote would do described it as an increase of [point-eight-zero cents per pack] “.80 cents/pack.”
And those aren’t the same thing.
If you write “80 cents,” you mean 80 pennies. You can also write that amount with a dollar sign as [zero-point-eight dollars] “$0.80.” But [zero-point-eight CENTS] “0.80 cents” means eight-tenths of one cent. So the ballot’s version was actually 100 times smaller than the intended tax.
The word “decimal” itself is all about ten. It comes from the Latin “decimus,” meaning “tenth,” and the phrase “decimal point” has been used in English since at least 1711. In the Arizona summary, that tiny decimal point before the "eighty" made a huge difference.
In fact, the Arizona Republic reported that the difference could lead to about $186 million in lost revenue. And despite its significance, the error survived drafting, review by the attorney general’s office, printing, and 40 public meetings. Finally, a sharp-eyed newspaper reader noticed the problem (but unfortunately, after early voting had started).
Fortunately, though, the full text of the initiative was more clear. It specified a tax of four cents for each cigarette, which worked out to 80 cents for a standard pack of 20. After voters approved the measure, Arizona’s attorney general decided the state could actually collect the full, intended 80 cents because the law was written correctly; it was just the summary that was wrong.
Now moving on to another Arizona initiative, we have another math-related problem.
In 2018, supporters of an education-funding initiative circulated petitions showing that their proposal would raise certain income-tax rates “by, quote, 3.46%” and “by 4.46%.”
But the proposed law said it would add 3.46 and 4.46 percentage points to the existing rates. Compared with the original rates, those changes actually represented huge increases. If you were talking percentages, the taxes would have gone up approximately 76% and 98%.
A percentage increase tells you the size of a change relative to the original number. A percentage point increase tells you the numerical difference between two percentages.
For example, if a tax goes from 5% to 10%, it's gone up by five percentage points. But it has also gone up by 100% because the new rate is twice as much as the old rate.
In this Arizona case, the Supreme Court said the petition description was misleading and removed the entire initiative from the ballot even though supporters had already collected about 270,000 signatures.
One inaccurate use of the word “percent” helped sink the whole effort (although to be fair, that wasn't the only problem — but it did come into play).
Next, we leave Arizona and move to Oregon. In 1996, Oregon voters approved property-tax Measure 47, but according to an article from the Oregon State Bar, the measure was so hard to interpret that Oregon’s deputy attorney general later said much of state government became paralyzed because nobody could determine exactly what the measure meant.
Oregon lawmakers drafted a replacement in 1997, Measure 50, that made things more clear, but because Measure 47 had amended the state constitution, they couldn't just handle the problem themselves. Voters had to vote on it again, making it an expensive edit.
Finally, we have a purely grammatical example.
When California voters approved Proposition 47 in 2014, one of its sentences discussed resentencing under a list of laws and then continued:
It was supposed to say something like "[this section] provides that resentencing is to take place
―pursuant to Sections [blah, blah, blah …], as those sections have been amended or added by this act.”
But the final Proposition left out the word "as."
So instead, it read, "[this section] provides that resentencing is to take place ― pursuant to Sections [blah, blah, blah …], [comma] those sections have been amended or added by this act.”
So now it ran two ideas together.
An appellate judge later pointed out that without the word “as,” the second part became an independent clause, violating the rules of punctuation and creating a comma splice, and he thought this essentially stripped the remaining part of any logical purpose.
In fact, he pointed to the missing "as" as an example of an obvious drafting error that a court could correct.
But he also said judges have to use, quote, "great restraint," unquote, when they're thinking about correcting voter-approved language so that fixing a mistake doesn't end up rewriting a law to say something the voters didn't actually want.
So there you go: a decimal point made a tobacco tax 100 times smaller, confusing “percent” with “percentage points” helped knock a whole initiative off the ballot, an incomprehensible Oregon measure had to be fixed and voted on again, and a missing “as” created a comma splice in California’s criminal code that a judge later highlighted as an obvious drafting error.
Proofreading ballot initiatives is a high-stakes activity that takes more than just checking spelling and punctuation. You have to check the numbers, the units, the definitions, the summary, and more.
So the next time someone tells you tiny writing details don't matter, you can point them to the decimal point that put $186 million in tax revenue at risk.
Arizona Attorney General’s Office. “Opinion No. I06-006: Proposition 203 Increase in State Tax on Cigarettes.” December 1, 2006. https://www.azag.gov/sites/default/files/2018-06/I06-006.pdf. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Arizona Secretary of State. “2006 Ballot Propositions: Proposition 203.” 2006. https://apps.azsos.gov/election/2006/info/PubPamphlet/english/prop203.htm. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Harper, Douglas. “Decimal.” *Online Etymology Dictionary*. https://www.etymonline.com/word/decimal. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Merriam-Webster. “Per Centum.” *Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary*. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/per%20centum. (accessed October 19, 2026)
*Molera v. Reagan*. 245 Ariz. 291, 428 P.3d 490. Arizona Supreme Court, 2018. https://law.justia.com/cases/arizona/supreme-court/2018/cv-18-0218-ap-el.html. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Oregon Department of Revenue. “A Brief History of Oregon Property Taxation.” https://www.oregon.gov/DOR/programs/gov-research/Documents/303-405-1.pdf. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Oregon State Bar. “Impact on the Bar: Ballot Measures.” *Oregon State Bar Bulletin*, October 2000. https://www.osbar.org/publications/bulletin/00oct/0010initiatives.htm. (accessed October 21, 2026)
*People v. Florez*. 245 Cal. App. 4th 1176. California Court of Appeal, 2016. https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2016/h040327.html. (accessed October 21, 2026)
Pitzl, Mary Jo. “Tiny Typo, Big Effect on Ballot.” *Arizona Republic*, October 25, 2006. https://arizonatax.org/news-article/tiny-typo-big-effect-ballot. (accessed October 19, 2026)
Next, I've been trying to prepare my house for the big storms we're supposed to get this winter in California, so the phrase "batten down the hatches" has been on my mind. This next segment is by Samantha Enslen.
by Samantha Enslen
Has anyone ever told you to batten down the hatches?
Well, if so, they were telling you to prepare for trouble.
Maybe they saw your boss walking angrily down the hall. Or maybe they heard the principal call you to his office.
Well, either way, they were warning you that a metaphorical big storm was coming — and that you'd better get ready.
"Batten down the hatches" is what sailors used to say when a real storm was coming.
You see, all ships have hatches or hatchways. These are square or rectangular holes in the deck, and you can use them to load cargo into a ship’s interior, or hold. You can also climb down through the hatches to get to living quarters below deck.
In old sailing ships, hatches were covered with an open wooden grating that prevented sailors from falling through the hatches as they walked across the deck. (That’s kind of important!) And they also let fresh air and sunlight flow down to the lower decks of the ship.
But, these open gratings were not so great during storms. If water crashed over the bow of the ship and ran across the deck, you wouldn’t want it to flow down into the hatches. Your ship would fill with water and could even potentially sink!
So to solve this problem, you can batten down the hatches. Here’s how.
1. Grab the grating and place it in the hatch.
2. Then, take a big piece of canvas tarpaulin and lay it over the hatch.
3. Now, get four battens — long, thin strips of wood like yardsticks. The word "batten" comes from a Middle English word to describe a finished board, and it's related to the word "baton."
4. And finally, nail those battens into each side of the hatch, securing the canvas tightly across the top.
Congratulations! You’ve just made the hatch watertight. In other words, you’ve battened down the hatches.
So, that’s your little tidbit for today. "Batten down the hatches" is a nautical term that now also metaphorically means to prepare for trouble.
That segment was by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
Ammer, Christine. Batten down the hatches. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Dent, Susie. Batten down the hatches. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.
Harper, Douglas. Batten (n). Etymonline. (accessed October 19, 2026).
King, Dean. A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian. 3rd ed. Holt Paperbacks, 2000.
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Batten down the hatches (subscription required, accessed July 19, 2016).
Parrott, Daniel. Tall Ships Down: The Last Voyages of the Pamir, Albatross, Marques, Pride of Baltimore, and Maria Asumpta. 1st ed. International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2004.
Finally, I have a familect from Tim.
"Hi, Grammar Girl, this is Tim from Kansas, and I have a familect for you, and it's 'chicken chicken,' which is an idiom. Not too long ago, my wife and I were driving, and I was trying to explain something to her, and I was just struggling to come up with the exact words to describe what I meant. And at that time, we drove past a restaurant, and that restaurant had a sign that said, 'chicken chicken,' and my wife thought it was rather funny that they repeated the word 'chicken,' and so she read it out loud. And so then, when I heard her say, 'chicken chicken,' I thought that that was maybe some idiom or something that I wasn't familiar with, meaning basically a breakdown in communication. So whenever one of us is trying to say something, and we just don't know what words to use, we say 'Oh, that's a chicken chicken,' or if we don't understand the other one, we might say, 'that's a chicken chicken,' which means you need to say that again, and maybe change the words so that I can understand what you mean. Thank you."
Oh my gosh, that's a good one, Tim. Thanks for the call!
If you want to tell me your familect like Tim, you can record from your computer or phone at Speakpipe.com/grammargirl or use the voicemail line, and both of those are in the show notes. Tell me your story!
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Dan Feierabend; and Holly Hutchings, who tried a new Chinese restaurant recently and can't wait to go back.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to like and subscribe.