Saturday 31 January 2009

My thought's on apostrophes'

Cynical Ben has reached the giddy heights of blogging fame: somebody he doesn't know personally has listed him on their blogroll (there's a fortuitous word invented by Americans with little grasp of colloquial English). 

As usual, he's written rather a lot of good sense over there, and seems to want to goad me into ranting about Birmingham Council's attack on apostrophes. However, this piece of news merely depressed me and confirmed my suspicion that the world is being run by my students, who have prosecuted their own war on grammar for many years. Let's be clearly: apostrophes distinguish alternative meanings. However, I do remember proposing a lucrative little business: sheets of self-adhesive apostrophes of varying sizes and fonts handily packaged for the mobile grammatarian. Now Ben's inspired a name: Stickler's Stickers. Any backers?

I do like his vision of me as a man 'marking the world's biggest essay'. I award the world an E on current performance.

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