supper at the E.T.A. dining hall

Somebody corrected the comma-splice on the dining-hall milk dispenser — MILK IS FILLING, DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE became a semicolon by the addition of a single blue dot — and the "fairly obvious person" needs no name, because the endnote supplies the signature: "Mrs. Incandenza always grades everything in blue ink." Avril, the Militant Grammarian of Massachusetts, cannot pass a comma-splice even on a staffer's hand-lettered milk sign, and her compulsion leaves a mark identifiable at a glance by its color. It's the operations machine in its smallest visible form — the mother's controlling touch on every surface of the grounds, unsignable and unmistakable at once, correcting the punctuation of the world in blue.