April 16, 2008
What’s in a dot?: The punctuation of the Strip
By STEVE FRIESS
At some point when I wasn’t looking, they slapped the word
“Encore” atop the new building that stands beside the tower
for which Encore is the, uh, encore. The original, of course,
is Wynn Las Vegas, or “Wynn.” (heretofore written as “Wynn Period”)
as it reads in script on it and on bottles of water and God
only knows what else.
It kind of disappointed me, that “Encore” sign did. There
was no punctuation to chew over. In the process, it seemed to
be undermining the very notion that this new building was a
continuation of some sort of thought or concept begun by Wynn
Period.
You probably think I’m a grammar geek. Guilty. But punctuation
is very, very important in Las Vegas. Almost nothing, not even
a dot after a name, is done without a great deal of thought.
When Steve Wynn decided to make his building read Wynn Period,
he was making a point. This was his big comeback after Kirk
Kerkorian and the MGM crowd snapped up Mirage Resorts and, with
it, the Bellagio, which had been seen up till then as Wynn’s
crowning masterpiece.
In 2005, his new building screamed Wynn Period as if to say,
“This is the Wynn. Period.” Wynn once told me as much, explaining
it was a subtle way of saying that this is the definition of
his embodiment as a resort, the ultimate. As subtle, that is,
as you can be on top of a 42-story building and so many bottles
of water.
There are other ways up and down the Strip that punctuation
comes into play in an important way. The exclamation point,
for instance, is used to exuberant effect, as in Donn Arden’s
Jubilee! and Mamma Mia!, though the latter uses that point throughout
the world. The colon is employed to, essentially, provide two
related but potentially independent names, as in Phantom: The
Las Vegas Spectacular and Manilow: Music and Passion. There’s
one intriguing use of the hyphen in “New York-New York.” It
must’ve been carefully chosen over the comma or no interim punctuation
at all, although someone must have rethought that, since it
appears with and without the hyphen on NYNYHotelCasino.com.
Ampersands also make a few important and historic appearances,
most notably in “Siegfried & Roy” and “Thomas & Mack,” serving
in both instances to form an inextricable tie between the two
names. How, for instance, could Siegfried ever perform without
his “& Roy”? (It also makes both parties indistinguishable;
I can’t tell you how many editors asked me after Roy’s tiger-attack
injury, “Which one’s Roy again?”)
Harrah’s Entertainment is, it seems, a company awash in punctuation.
Along with the aforementioned exclamation point in Jubilee!,
the apostrophes are sprinkled in generously, as in Harrah’s
and Rao’s and Bill’s, to denote a tribute to a founder of some
sort, although the one “Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon” is just an attempt
to be hickish. Because I guess they think that Vegas visitors
think hick schtick is cool?
I deliberately left Bally’s out just now, because from what
I can tell, there was nobody named Bally in the first place.
In fact, my exhaustive research—okay, I looked up Bally Technologies
on Wikipedia—shows it may descend from the Chicago-based pinball-machine
company as a derivative of the name of their first successful
game, the Ballyhoo. Which means that this apostrophe is meaningless,
as it doesn’t attribute ownership or responsibility to anyone.
Kinda sad.
Also meaningless—and a lot more irksome—was the ellipsis that
followed the name of a certain Canadian songstress’ old production
at the Colosseum, A New Day … . What was the point of those
three dots other than to confound those of us in the media who
felt we had to write them every time we mentioned the show?
While we’re on the topic of Céline, there’s the matter of
foreign names and their little accent marks. (Is an accent mark
considered punctuation? Wikipedia isn’t clear.) They’re always
tossed in to imply something fancy or exotic. Often, as with
Kà, Le Rêve, Joël Robuchon and Mystère, it tends to work. The
Harley Davidson Café and Café Ba Ba Reeba, maybe not so much.
What’s fun to do if you have some time is to imagine how an
errant accent could alter the entire meaning of a name. Pure,
for instance, would be Puré. Well, that is how some people feel
after they’ve been soaked to a pulp by doormen, right?
It’s interesting, in fact, that we embark on this study the
week after Harrah’s Entertainment announced it’s soon to be
Caesars Entertainment. Caesars is one of the most intriguing
examples of an absence of punctuation that baffles to no end.
There is no apostrophe, even though “Caesar’s” would make more
sense to most. In fact, Clark County thought so too when they
included the apostrophe in the street sign along Flamingo Road
when the Augustus Tower first opened.
A Google search for “Caesar’s Palace,” in fact, yields 500,000
results, the first of which is the actual hotel, implying they
know this is a pretty common mistake, and they’ve gamed the
Google algorithm so as to not lose any eyeballs. But Jay Sarno,
the resort’s developer, deliberately wanted it to be Caesars
Palace because he believed that at his hotel, everybody is a
Caesar. Trouble is, if that’s so, then technically the place
should be called Caesars’ Palace.
All of this brings us back to the original point. Leaving
Encore without any punctuation creates a baffling dissonance
from its forebear, Wynn Period. I know it’s unrealistic, but
I guess I expected some sort of punctuation for Encore, too.
Maybe it should read “… Encore” to show it’s part of the previous
notion? Or maybe “Encore!” since the word is usually shouted
with enthusiasm? If it underwhelms, maybe it should be “Encore?”
Come to think of it, that’s pretty cool. There are plenty
of marks in Vegas, but not a single question mark.
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