Summary
IT SEEMS that the apostrophe, that tadpole-shaped punctuation mark which spawns grammatical chaos throughout the land, is wriggling its way into more inappropriate situations than ever before. Witness red faces at Marks & Spencer earlier this week when the company admitted publicly to making "a silly mistake" after including a misplaced apostrophe in a slogan on its range of children's Christmas pyjamas. Borrowing from the song White Christmas, it included the line "just like the one's we used to know".
The much put-upon apostrophe must be the most misused and abused item of punctuation in the English language, just a blip on a page, but clearly not on everyone's radar as it crops up extraneously - or fails to appear when required - in shop windows, menus, company names, press releases, on signposts and even tombstones. Random examples include "Delicious pizza's" (but delicious pizza's what?), "Royal College of GP's" (who should really know better, one might have thought), "Your soul's are now in Heaven" (but our punctuation remains sadly earthbound), "Help is on it's way" (but send for a grammarian), "House of Lord's" (from BBC Ceefax), or the shop- window sign, passed by this writer every morning on his way to work, advertising a fleet of chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces for weddings - "Silver Cloud's, Silver Shadow's, Silver Spirit's - luxury motoring, you might say, with anarchic punctuation thrown in, gratis.See the full content of this document
Extract
Obituary for the Apostrophe?
The subversive little mark is eroding the very heart of our nationhood: while Mel Gibson earned much stick for daubing William Wallace with blue face-paint, as an irate reader pointed out in this newspaper's letters pages some years ago, the Guardian of Scotland's memory was further sullied by a peppering of inappropriate apostrophes - "it's" used instead of...
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