The Cambridge, England, City Council recently ruled that apostrophes should be removed from all street signs to avoid confusion, but the city’s Good Grammar Company warned “if they take our apostrophes, commas will be next.”
Good Grammar Company Director Kathy Salaman said she fully supported grammar police who use black marker pens to fill in the missing apostrophes. She contended that leaving apostrophes out of signs could confuse children and teach them that grammar isn’t important.
One example: In the sign “Scholars’ Way Leading to Pepys’ Court,” the two apostrophes were missing until grammar vigilantes wrote them in with marker pens.
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The punctuation wars are also fought locally. In one of my recent columns, reader Rickie Sevadjian, of Point Loma, emphasized the importance of the comma used before a direct address, as in “Go, Padres!” Soon after, the same point was driven home in Mike Peters’ delightful “Mother Goose & Grimm” comic strip. In that episode, yellow dog Grimm says to the cat Attila, “Let’s eat Attila.” Then Grimm says, “Let’s eat, Attila.” With relief, Attila sighs, “Commas save lives.”
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Then there are the spelling wars. Believe it or not, a catering company recently advertised its delicious “Super Bowel Party Platters!!”
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And, finally, the grammar wars.
In colleges and universities, students from time to time lead a cow upstairs and into an administrator’s office. The prank is popular because while you can lead a cow upstairs, you can’t lead it downstairs. I know a number of cows like this. They’re the bogus usage rules that get herded into our national consciousness. It isn’t long before we can’t get them out of the building.
One of the most hefty and intractable bovines is the injunction against using a preposition to end a sentence. I recently issued a challenge to readers to wing me any citation from a reputable grammar book that supports the ban on terminal prepositions. Not a single reader has sent me such a citation. That’s because the so-called rule is pure gossip, perpetuated by those who seek to protect us against the way the English language is actually used.
I’ve recently shared funny stories that mock the terminal preposition proposition. Herewith the present my fourth, final and favorite tale:
On an airplane, a boy attending public school ends up sitting next to a boy attending private school. To be friendly, the public schooler turns to the preppie and asks, “What school are you at?”
The preppie looks down his aquiline nose at the public school student and comments, “I happen to attend an institution at which we are taught to know better than to conclude sentences with prepositions.”
The boy at public school pauses for a moment and then says: “All right, then. What school are you at, dingbat!” (In other versions of this joke, the last word is saltier than dingbat.)
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A Wal-Mart superstore may soon be coming to my neighborhood, Scripps Ranch. I have no strong feelings one way or t’other about a big-box establishment landing near me, but I do note that when you spoonerize (reverse the initial consonants in) the name Wal-Mart, you end up with a Mall-Wart. Hmmm.
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In a recent Reader’s Digest, comedian John McDowell recently pointed out the importance of having a good vocabulary: “If I had known the difference between the words antidote and anecdote, one of my good friends would still be living.”
Turns out that a real-life cookbook advertised that “each recipe is accompanied by an antidote!” That book did not sell well.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com