Bus-ted

Metro bus' timetable shows buses coming "10 minutes or less". Unfortunately, they should've said "fewer"!

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What would Henry say?

Here's a Ford dealership offering brand new "Fiesta's". Very professional! They also offer "Fusion's" and "Ka's".

This is another one that I managed to blog about on the move. Honestly, though, are they mad? A proper, professional Ford dealership shouldn't do this. Second-hand car salesmen might be acceptable (though you know me by now, no-one is safe from criticism), but this is nigh on unforgivable. Stop buying Fords! No matter how many dazzling shades of black they come in.

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Sculder and Mully

Thanks to Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All linking to me in an article about The X Files pilot, and Technorati reporting this linkage to me, I've managed to track down the offending extra apostrophe and capture a picture of it, as you can see above.

According to the Smarty Pants, the full text reads:

Agent Mulder’s insistence of time loss, due to unknown forces', cannot be validated or substantiated by this witness.

However, on review of the episode (which was in no way found on the Internet at all), just before the word "unknown" would come into view, the camera cuts away. I want to believe that the errant apostrophe is a closing (single) quotation mark, and there's an opening one before "unknown". Skeptics may disagree, but don't be fooled by the conspiracy...

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It starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes and apostrophes

REM's famous song, It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) has two things. It has an obscenely long title which is a pain to type; but worse is cover art for the single, using "Its" instead of "It's". This was first brought to my attention in an article about songs you should never play in bar, this being one of them (because no-one ever remembers all the lyrics).

If it is the end of the world, then can we please go out with apostrophes in the right places, instead of dropped and lying forgotten, reminisced over by me and all those other bloggers who moan about punctuation matters? It's bad enough trying to remember all the machine-gun-pace lyrics, and then they go and spoil everything by bad English! Though who exactly "they" are, I don't know. REM or IRS Records? Anyway, if this has spoilt your appreciation for ITEOTWAWKI(AIFF)*, then here's a treat for you:

*What a ludicrous acronym, I think typing out the mammoth-sized full title might have even been a better idea!

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Underground

This was taken at a London Underground station, and manages to insult the brilliant engineering and set a bad example for kids!

Wee! I blogged this as a test using my mobile phone, which means I can blog on the move. Awesome. One slight problem, the title ends up as "multimedia message", and I can't add labels. But that's a fair price to pay, I think. Oh, and it definitely means much shorter blog posts, because I like my thumbs.

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Washington Mutual

Stacy did not manage to snap a photograph of the offending sign, but instead explains what it does look like:

I do not have a photo, but two huge WaMu advertisements in my local Washington Mutual bank
branch display the following logo (missing an apostrophe in lets):

"Lets do more together!"

Ironically, it is an ad that also mentions education and schools.

The huge signs are displayed in the branch in Center Moriches, NY.

If anyone spots the same sign, it would be appreciated if they could photograph it.

It is just stupid and pathetic when large companies like banks can't even get it right. They must employ many people - in the hundreds, at least. Are they all hapless with punctuation? It's more understanable if local farmer McDonald tells you about his "pig's", but when bigger companies do it, what's their excuse? Really, I'd like to hear it!

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Taxi driver can't drive...

...because his apostrophe knowledge is a bit wonky. I know it's the Daily Mail, but it doesn't sound like they're making a big fuss over nothing in this story. Laurence Kirk's private-hire driving licence has expired since he last did the job (six years ago). He applied to his council for a new licence and was faced with a GCSE English exam. He got 60%, but to pass he needed 70%. With most questions centred around questions like "where does the apostrophe go?", "which of these is the correct spelling?" and similar questions, Mr Kirk thinks this is "barmy". The "test that floored him" is copied at the bottom of this post, if you want to see if you could drive a taxi...

It is totally irrelevant to me if a taxi driver can't punctuate properly (as long as he isn't writing his own signs, of course), although it's my opinion that a 50-year-old man shouldn't have too much difficultly with such tasks.

There's more on that story from many other sources, though modern journalism dictates they're all churning out the same story based on the same story from wire agencies. But here's a few.

When I searched the Mail website for this story, I came across other apostrophe-related articles, all pretty much saying it's on its way out. They are...

• M&S had a baby's sleepsuit with the phrase "Mummy's dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the one's she used to know" [read more] - honestly, you would have thought somebody might have realised during the production process!
• In a test, teachers made huge mistakes over simple apostrophe errors, mixing up "I" and "me" and other awful English mistakes [read more] - perhaps I should become a teacher, to try and even up the average?
• Even bright GCSE pupils are not using any punctuation, with examiners claiming "punctuation seems to be disappearing altogether" and asking "How long it will be before the apostrophe is deemed unnecessary through lack of use?" [read more] - but that's OK, because...
• ...GCSE pupils will be denied good grades for bad spelling, grammar and punctuation [read more] - but I doubt this will actually happen.

There you go, then.

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