Honestly, I’ve tried. Sometimes I go a few weeks without mentioning them, but that is rare. I’ve vowed not to let them bother me so much. But then I saw a sign advertising egg’s and chicken’s for sale.
I’m going to have to talk about apostrophes again.
In an early column I wrote for The Courier I claimed to have invented a remedy for the misuse of apostrophes. I was rather proud of it.
It was NIP: Not In Plurals. If in doubt over whether to use an apostrophe in cakes, chips or DVDs (all words which are routinely given apostrophes) you should NIP it out.
I imagined myself being hired by sign-writing firms, schools, and shops to share my “cure”. A sort of apostrophes superhero. I would fly in (or limp in my slightly gouty way) and right apostrophe wrong’s (see what I did there? Clever eh?), educate wrongdoers, and more or less save the planet.
But this idea has not worked. If anything, it provoked a backlash because there seem to be more apostrophe misuses than ever.
Perhaps shock tactics would be more effective. I shall modify my NIP idea. It will become NIPPLE.
As an acronym it is slightly less pleasing. It stands for: Not In Plurals, Possessives Love ‘Em. Who could forget (when faced with a decision on using an apostrophe) the trauma of a wee, grey-haired, chubby bloke talking about nipples? I could have the photo at the bottom of this column altered to show me naked from the waist up.
However, jokes aside, let us examine this in the cold light of long and bitter experience. We’ll have to admit that the battle for apostrophes will be lost.
One day soon, the appearance of an apostrophe in a plural will be deemed correct. Because that’s what happens in the English language: when enough idiots use a word incorrectly the wrong becomes right. The same will happen with apostrophe placement.
In the sure and certain knowledge that our side is the right side I’ll fight this until my last breath, as I hope you will. But if even my manly torso can’t rectify the matter, what hope is left for humanity?
Word of the week
Vility (noun)
Vileness, baseness. EG: “Good manners prevent me fully describing the vility of he who would put an apostrophe in chicken’s”.
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
