I’ve been having a bit of a break over the Christmas and New Year period, hence the three weeks’ hiatus in postings. However, I have not been keeping my eyes closed. Here are a couple of the things that caught my eye on the language front.
Firstly, that great institution W H Smith seems to have changed from a newsagent and bookseller to a greengrocer, given the perhaps misplaced apostrophe (aka the greengrocer’s apostrophe) in its voucher reproduced below:
I wonder if they’re now selling newspaper’s, magazine’s and book’s?
Secondly, I’m indebted to the Rotten Boroughs page of Private Eye for drawing my attention to the language deficiencies of Bristol City Council. In December this local waste of public money passed a motion regretting “the actions of past Bristol citizens engaged in the slave trade”. However, either for reasons of political correctness or an inability to find the spellcheck on the word processor (hint: try F7), the victims were referred to throughout as ‘Afrikans’. As the Eye helpfully pointed out, this spelling clearly places Bristol City Council in the same class as such inclusive groups as the Wehrmacht’s Afrika Korps and the apartheid regime of Zuid Afrika.
Furthermore, if you read the Council’s press release on the motion, you’ll see not only that they can’t decide who wrote it (multiple choice authorship for press releases: is this a first from BCC?), but the greengrocer’s apostrophe crops up in the penultimate sentence of the third paragraph:
It’s full text is set out below.
Clearly, the Council did not take my advice of a few years ago that they use part of the education budget for adult literacy classes for their staff!
Anyway, now that normal service has been resumed, I shall have to get round to moderating the comments that have accumulated; if yours is in the queue, please be patient.
