As I stood in a blessedly short line at the friendly neighborhood Wachovia bank this morning, a small poster on the bullet proof glass between customers and tellers caught my eye. The first line of its long headline read:
Values Free Checking
A mirage? I shook my head, looked away and looked back. Nope. It’s still there. What the heck is values free checking and shouldn’t it be values-free, with a hyphen?
Oh, hang on, at the bottom of the poster there’s a small photo of a guy made even smaller by a fake wriggly white snapshot frame the likes of which nobody has seen since Pat Nixon discovered martinis.
Then I got it. The lack of a hyphen between Values and Free was intentional! Ah, that changes Values from a plural noun to a singular verb.
So the guy in the photo finds the free checking here valuable. He values it. Wow. And I thought that Wachovia had become so cynical that they offered a checking account with no values: no financial values, no family values, no corporate values, just no values at all.
How nice of the bank to give us these little games to play while we wait in line.