Well now hasn’t today been a voyage of discovery?!  I have just learnt of the existence of a completely new punctuation mark; it’s called the suspension point.

No, it’s not one of those.  That’s an entirely different sort of suspension point.  The one I am talking about is a linguistic one.  “So what is it?” I hear you ask – well I’ll explain it now.  Here goes …

Did you see it?  Yes, that was it!  No no, back there!  Just after the word “goes”.  Those three little full stops.  Yes apparently that’s called a suspension point, and frankly I find that quite interesting because I have been using them (wrongly as it happens) for longer than I care to remember.

The reason for me writing this drivel is that I have just been scorned by my good friend Plutus.  You know, the one who enraged me previously when he taunted me about the elusive 50p coin?  Yes, that one.  Anyway, it turns out that unbeknownst to me he is a reader of this site, and today he left a comment in response to my rant about the Apostrophe Abuse.  I thought it was quite a good rant, and you simply won’t believe how many times I checked it to ensure that I’d not made any grammatical errors.  To do such a thing in a grammatical rant would have been unforgivable, but despite my best efforts it transpires that I actually made a complete monkey’s breakfast of my suspension point.  Now I thought that when people used a series of full stops it was just a random collection of them, used to imply a pause.  The “slang” of punctuation, if you will.  But no, I have done my research and dammit he’s right.

Personally I am taking a little bit of comfort from the thought that Plutus could now be sitting at home wondering whether he has made himself look like the worst kind of snobby language-obsessed arse.  Or at the very least I sincerely hope that’s the case.  Incidentally, if you’d like to read some of his drivel then you can do so here.

Quite honestly though I really am rather cross about this whole affair, because it turns out that (a) he is right, and (b) I was close.  I had used four full stops rather than three, and that’s really not too bad in the grand scheme of things.  I take his point though; the use of more than ten full stops really is unforgivable and admittedly it has always struck me as looking highly sloppy.  But on this particular occasion I am pleading innocence because I didn’t even know that there was a linguistic / grammatical convention about such things.  Sadly I do now, and it therefore means that I shall lie awake tonight wondering in how many places I have previously made the same mistake.  Of course to most of the population this will be a matter of completely inconsequential pedanticism, but to me this is a big deal.  Why?  Well because I’ve written quite a few articles in my time and therefore there’s a very good chance that I’ve made the same mistake in an awful lot of places.

Bugger.

Its amazing that peoples ability to use simple thing’s like punctuation mark’s is not better.  Its also really annoying when corporation’s cant get it right either.

Now then…. many of you will by now be internally screaming.  Some of you may even have suffered an uncontrollable verbal outburst at the true horror of what I’ve just done.  I should perhaps make it completely clear at this point that my first paragraph was written deliberately, and it pained me dearly to do so.  If you have managed to read this far and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, then hang your head in shame but do please keep reading.

I’m talking about this….

Most of you will recognise it as an apostrophe, which is a marvellous little feature of the English language and when used correctly can save time, space, and generally allow a sentence to flow an awful lot better.  But the simple fact is that there is far too much abuse of this little punctuation mark in the world.  I have been doing my absolute best to correct it whenever I can, but one has to be very careful when correcting others if one doesn’t wish to end up looking like an arse.  It shouldn’t be the case, because after all it’s merely the act of preserving the English language so that it doesn’t get abused any further.  Now perhaps this makes me a language snob, but I just cannot ignore the fact that there are plenty of people in the world who believe that the basic principles of our language can be cast aside for the sake of social acceptance.  Well, I’m afraid that I’m not one of them.  Innit.

To make matters worse, I see far too many incorrect signs and posters which have been produced by multi-million pound corporations.  How on earth can this be allowed to happen?  Do they not have marketing departments whose job it is to check such things?  It’s a slippery slope – the BBC will probably be doing it next, and at that stage I may have to emigrate on general principle.

So imagine my joy when I found that some clever soul has managed to tackle the subject of apostrophe abuse in a graphical and fun way, by producing a website to educate the masses.  Here is the link, and I am only too pleased to share it with you.