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.