Page 11 - IAV Digital Magazine #451

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Graduation Cake Censored To “Summa — Laude” After Online Order Apparently Deemed Profane
Jacob Koscinski was certainly worthy of a grand graduation cake: The 18-year-old earned a 4.79 GPA in his Christian-based home-school pro- gram and is now set to head to North Carolina’s Wingate University later this year on a full scholarship.
But per WCIV, when partygoers got their first glimpse Saturday of the sheet cake for the South Carolina teen, it was a “huge shock” for every- one, his mom says. Cara Koscinski had ordered the cake online through Publix, request- ing that it include the message “summa cum
laude” to sig- nal the high honors Jacob had received.
But because Publix’s algorithm apparently deemed the middle word (which
means “with”
in the Latin phrase) a profane one,
it automati-
cally gener- ated three hyphens in
its place: The cake revealed at the party read “summa — laude.”
“Utterly ridicu- lous,” Koscinski wrote on
her Facebook page.
The Washington Post tried to
order a cake on the Publix site using the same phrase and got an alert that said “Profane/special characters not allowed.”
Koscinski notes when she got that message, she explained the meaning of
the phrase in the “special instruc- tions” field and included a link to a site that explained it more fully. The hyphenated replacement for the omitted word actually made things worse for Jacob, who called the whole
thing “frustrating and humiliating.”
“I had to explain to my friends and family ... what that meant,” he tells WCIV. “They were giggling uncontrollably.”
Publix offered to redo the cake, but Jacob’s mom
turned it down, as the graduation party had already passed. Instead, she received a refund for the $70 she’d spent, as well as a store gift card. (Four words on a New Jersey high school’s prom tickets caused a problem.)
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine