There’s a sign on the verge near my parents’ house. “Football: If you’re looking to make friends, get fit (and get a cheeky few beers in!) join the under 25s.” Each time I see it, I fight the urge to stop the car, take a pen, and draw an apostrophe above the “you’re”. Call it early onset pedantry, but I wince at missing, wandering and bogus apostrophes. Some sign writers, terrified of being caught short, go into apostrophal spasms: “Get you’re five-a-day Super Green’s juice!”
I’m a fusspot, I know. But I’m not alone. Up and down the country, teachers, admissions tutors, sifters of CVs and cover letters groan at wild misspellings, strange possessives and a Jackson Pollock approach to punctuation: Just load up your pen with ink and ... spatter.
Still, there’s something pleasing about it being up to amateur stick-in-the-muds to worry about rogue punctuation marks. As yet there is no Gradgrind government quango, no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Semi-Colons. Instead, we have squabbling factions: Schoolmarmish sticklers on one side; let-all-the-hyphens-hang-out liberals on the other.
Still, better our benign system of tutting and stealthy pen corrections than Kazakhstan’s rule by decree. The poor Kazakhs have just had their alphabet overhauled for the second time in a year. The grand Pooh-bahs of punctuation declared last October that the Cyrillic alphabet would be replaced by a Latin one, heavy on apostrophes to denote distinct sounds. There was uproar. Now, the rules are to change again, with Kazakhstan adopting the same system as Turkmenistan. Aren’t you glad to have nothing worse to worry about than the Grocer’s Apostrophe?
While as a nation Britain would mount the barricades for an apostrophe, Britons are admirably adaptable when it comes to linguistic invention. Unlike the Academie francaise, vainly holding back the tide of “le code wifi”, “le hashtag” and “le brunch”, Britons play word games, delight in mash-ups, try silly puns and see if they stick. The past two years have given us Brexiteer, Remoaner, Faragist and Maybot. To be Mogged — as in Jacob Rees-Mogg — is to have one’s arguments countered with excessive verbal courtesy.
My future father-in-law coined this lovely phrase: “The Lady Stag”. He means Hen Do. But Lady Stag (Deer Do? Doe Do?) makes me laugh. I am beginning to get to grips with “wedmin” (wedding admin), and hope not to turn into “Bridezilla”. When I took a friend to the ballet, she texted during the interval: “Argh. Stuck in the quoo”. The inevitable, endless ladies’ loo queue. “Plop Art” is another favourite. Public sculpture plonked any old where.
We may be pedantic, but we’ll never be doctrinaire. We are too busy relishing the argument, on everything from split infinitives to Oxford commas, to ever get around (whoops) to enshrining “good” usage in law.
While I might roll my eyes at the sign on the verge, there is something brilliant about a language that comes up with the “cheeky beer” with all its connotations of don’t-tell-the-missus, one-for-the-road, pull-me-a-pint, prop-up-the-bar and this-round’s-on-me. Have fun, lads. And to the new recruits: Best of beginners’ — apostrophe — luck.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Laura Freeman is an author whose work The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite was recently published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
