First, I’m surprised that you get that many checks. Second, do you really have them do it over? Back in the olden days, I didn’t care what anyone wrote on the payee line on the check. As long as the back was stamped with my “for deposit only, mordecaiB, Acct#123456” stamp, neither I or the bank cared what was on the front.
I had to look it up, I didn’t know that was a thing. My day wasn’t totally wasted, I learned a new fact.
Yes, it’s normal and always has been, as far as I know. Nobody misunderstands it at all.
I’m not certain, since it was 45 years ago, but I’m pretty sure I was taught that in elementary school. I’ve never done it any other way.
To answer your first question, it’s not a huge amount of our sales, but we do get several dozen per day as there are a number of senior apartments/communities nearby and older people are the overwhelming majority of people who write checks for groceries these days, to the point that “is under 50 and is writing a check” is a warning sign of potential fraud in and of itself.
To answer the second, I don’t know if it’s an issue with the bank, but our store’s bookkeeper is very insistent that we make sure that the everything on the front of the check, including the payee, is written correctly.
Lucky people around you. Several dozen is amazing, even if it’s small change overall. It’s next to impossible to write a check anywhere here. I never even considered the fraud under 50 thing.
Gotcha, I remember people like that. From what I remember of checks back in the old days, you couldn’t read half the stuff people wrote, especially men. That’s why I made sure my employees wrote the dollar amount of the check on the back, along with their initials. Nothing worse than having to add several hundred checks up on your adding machine and having to guess at the amount on a bunch of them.
The other way around there’s Brussels sprouts, which most people seem to render as Brussel sprouts in print (orally, it’s difficult to tell, as the esses elide into each other.)
If you buy a Lego set in the US is there any way to tell from the packaging that you shouldn’t refer to the collection of pieces as Legos? I called them Legos all the way into adulthood which is about when I learned that technically it was just Lego (or Lego pieces).
Nobody would say “New Year Eve”, because “New Year’s Eve” is actually correct- it’s the eve of the New Year, so the possessive apostrophe makes sense. And nobody says “Happy New Year’s”, at least without sounding like they fell off the turnip truck.
When would the confusion between New Year and New Year’s come into play? Every usage I can think of is like the “New Year’s Eve” example.
Eh… the construction sounds unobjectionable to my ears – pretty sure I’ve commonly heard it that way among my peers, but perhaps we all fell off a turnip truck, or at least a rutabaga van.