I remember, at the start of the Two Weeks Notice publicity campaign in the spring of 2003, emerging cheerfully from Victoria Station (was I whistling?) and stopping dead in my tracks with my fingers in my mouth. What about that film Two Weeks Notice? Guaranteed to give sticklers a very nasty turn, that was its posters slung along the sides of buses in letters four feet tall, with no apostrophe in sight. Meanwhile a newspaper placard announces "FAN'S FURY AT STADIUM INQUIRY", which sounds quite interesting until you look inside the paper and discover that the story concerns a quite large mob of fans, actually not just the lone hopping-mad fan so promisingly indicated by the punctuation.Įverywhere one looks, there are signs of ignorance and indifference. A sign at a health club will announce, "I'ts party time, on Saturday 24th May we are have a disco/party night for free, it will be a ticket only evening." Advertisements offer decorative services to "wall's ceiling's door's ect". True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who "eats, shoots and leaves", but in general the stickler's exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all sides, causing feelings of panic and isolation.
One almost dare not get up in the mornings. It's tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word "Book's" with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards but just don't bother to go any further.
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's." A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't.
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