'Apostrophe Warrior' Attacks

Steven C. sends this today from the Telegraph (note the British punctuation in the story):

Apostrophe warrior Stefan Gatward's mission to correct our wayward grammar
Accountant Stefan Gatward, who shot to fame for correcting the grammar of a street sign in Royal Tunbridge Wells, has launched a campaign to correct errors in signs across the town.

By Patrick Sawer
Published: 9:00PM BST 22 Aug 2009

Even his admirers admit he is "a bit of an old codger". But Stefan Gatward –accountant, former private in the Gordon Highlanders and now Anglican day chaplain – remains unrepentant.

The apostrophe warrior of Tunbridge Wells Known as The Apostrophe Man of Royal Tunbridge Wells, Mr Gatward shot to fame last week after taking the law (or at least a bylaw) into his own hands by adding a missing apostrophe to the street signs on his road.

St Johns Close became St John's Close and overnight Mr Gatward gained respect and derision in equal measure. While many of his neighbours congratulated him on his stand, the apostrophe was scratched off three days later.

Fearful of an appearance at a magistrate's court – or should that be magistrates' court? – Mr Gatward decided not to paint in the apostrophe again.

Read the rest.

The English Apostrophe Catastrophe

Thanks to all the members of SPOGG who took the time to send us this:

In Britain, it's an apostrophe catastrophe

It's a story about a decision to eliminate apostrophes from street signs. The logic is amusingly twisted.

"We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do," said one of the politicians.

Removing apostrophes seems a silly way to end a debate; now, the signs are all wrong. Grammarians will never let this one go.

Still, what SPOGG really objects to is the sub-headline in the MSNBC story that says "grammarians revolt."

While we aren't proud that it's nearly 3 p.m. and we still haven't taken our daily shower, we generally prefer the term "rebel" in cases like this.

"Revolt" can mean to rebel or defy authority, of course. But it's one of those words that can be easily confused, so we avoid it, much as we avoided the body-odorrific British journalist we met last week on an assignment in Los Angeles.

SPOGG is not revolting! Just a little unclean! We promise!

Oooh! Spellbinding!

British researchers have concluded that the most commonly misspelled word in published documents and on the Internet is "supersede." (We're thinking on the Internet at least, they might have overlooked "ponography.")

In any case, here's a really interesting article that blames common misspellings on a variety of causes: misinterpretations of etymology and meaning, and errors related to pronunciation.

And here are the most commonly misspelled words, at least in published documents:

Five most difficult words based on wrong assumptions relating to content: supersede (precede), inoculate (innocuous), sacrilegious (religious), consensus (census), liquefy (liquid)

Five most difficult words based on a foreign language root: broccoli (Italian), haemorrhage (ancient Greek), connoisseur, manoeuvre, lieutenant (French) [NOTE: SOME ARE BRITISH SPELLINGS--In the U.S., you'd see hemorrhage and maneuver.]

Five most difficult words based on difference in pronunciation: conscience, indict, foreign, mortgage, phlegm

Phlegm! That's a word everyone should know how to spell. All you teachers out there, please put it on your lists.

Something We Like

We've subscribed to quite a few language and grammar newsletters. We particularly like Brian Garner's daily e-mails from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Today's entry:

-fy.. Most verbs ending in "-fy" -- from the French "-fier" or Latin "-ficare" "to do or make" -- are preceded by an "-i-" {classify}. But a few aren't {liquefy} {putrefy} {stupefy} because the corresponding infinitives in French and Latin are spelled with an "-e-" ("liquefier," etc.), and the words were borrowed directly from those forms. It's common to misspell them "-ify." The same switch occurs in the corresponding nouns, too ("liquefaction," etc.).

gabardine; gaberdine. "Gabardine" is the modern fabric having a hard finish and diagonal ribs. "Gaberdine" is the outer garment traditionally associated with Jews of the Middle Ages.

Gaelic; Gallic. "Gaelic" /GAY-lik/ means "Scottish" or "Irish"; "Gallic" /GAL-ik/ means "French." As a noun, "Gaelic" denotes the language spoken by the Celts of the Scottish Highlands -- or, more broadly, by the Celts of Ireland and the Isle of Man as well. "Gallic," though formerly denoting a Frenchman, is not used as a noun in modern English.

gainsay; contradict. Originally "gainsay" [ME "to say against"] was the popular word and "contradict" the erudite one. Today just the opposite is true: "This is an interesting example of the substitution of a learned word for a popular word.'Withsay' [or, later, 'gainsay'] is pure Anglo-Saxon, and 'contradict' is a 'learned' borrowing [from Latin]." James B. Greenough & George L. Kittredge, Words and Their Ways in English Speech 215 (1902). "Gainsay" is now a formal word more common in British English than American.
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Quotation of the Day: "Murdering English is common on both sides of the
Atlantic." S.P.B. Mais, The Writing of English 198 (1935).

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This is Scheinola...

We must stop reading Adam Schein's prose, because Fox's Scheinola is starting to look like that other, less-polite word that starts with s. Today he writes the following:

Obviously it is way too early to get into forecasts. [But he's going to do it anyway.] Seattle is a very good team; the Rams had a good draft and good free agency period; and I'm Rollin with Nolan and the Niners.

But I just love the direction Arizona is headed in, with its new impact players in the draft, its solid free agency period, and most especially, the
appointment of Whisenhunt and his staff to make it sing and maximize the
talented players they already have in the desert.

Now, we love a semicolon as much, if not more, than the next guy. Schein's a bit liberal with them in the first paragraph. Easy, buddy! Semicolons are the bench-warmers of punctuation marks. You only play them when you need to.

Worse, though, is his second paragraph, where the team is simultaneously an "it" and a "they." Adam, Adam, Adam... either go with the singular American pronoun or the plural British one. If you do both, people will think you're Canadian or something. Is that the football league you really want to be covering?

Our recommendation to you: shorter sentences. These are the baby steps of prose. Once you can master a single noun and a single verb, we give you permission to insert adjectives and recursive phrases.

As it is, your random recursiveness just has us cursing. Scheinola!

Ask SPOGG: Reader Questions Answered

Do you have a question for SPOGG? We'll do our best to answer. The following questions come from the lovely Lucy, who's been forced to play grammar pingpong between her teachers and her bosses.

Our answers are in red (and Lucy's teachers should be spanked).

Hi, hope you can help resolve the discrepancy between what I was taught and what I'm now being told.

1. Taught: Period goes outside the quotation marks.

Example: John replied, "I'm going home".

Told: Period goes inside the quotation marks.

Example: John replied, "I'm going home."

Did you learn English in England? With British punctuation, the period does go outside. In the United States, we put periods and commas inside. So, your second example is correct while your first is not (assuming you're writing in the colonies, that is).

2. Taught: Put a colon at beginning of a series and never put a semi-colon in front of the word "and".

Example of taught: Responsible for all non-sales related operations such as: A/P, A/R, payroll, and human resources.

Told: No puncuation at the beginning of a series and yes, put a semi-colon in front of the word "and".

Example of told: Responsible for all non-sales related operations such as A/P; A/R; payroll; and human resources.

It depends on two things: how your series is introduced and how complex it is.

1) If you'd said, "Responsible for all non-sales-related operations: A/P, A/R, payroll and human resources," then you'd use a colon. But you have "such as" there, so no colon is needed.

2) You do NOT need the semicolons with a simple sequence such as the one you've described. But if the sequence were more complex, like this one, it would help keep things clear:

"I love the characters in Harry Potter: the academic, passionate Hermione; the bumbling, loyal Ron Weasley; and the oleaginous, intriguing Professor Snape."

A comma between characters and their descriptions here would not be sufficient.

We recommend "The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual" for questions like these, unless you're writing for a more formal publication, in which case "The Chicago Manual of Style" is a better choice.