Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online

gamekeeper Mellors says to his employer’s wife in chapter eight of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover :
“ ’Appen yer’d better ’ave this key, an’ Ah min fend for t’ bods some other road . . . ’Appen Ah can find anuther pleece as’ll du for rearin’ th’ pheasants. If yer want ter be ’ere, yo’ll non want me messin’ abaht a’ th’ time.”
    “Why don’t you speak ordinary English?” Lady Chatterley inquires, saucily.
     
    6 It features in Irish names such as O’Neill and O’Casey:
    Again the theory that this is a simple contraction – this time of “of” (as in John o’ Gaunt) – is pure woolly misconception. Not a lot of people know this, but the “O” in Irish names is an anglicisation of “ua”, meaning grandson.
     
    7 It indicates the plurals of letters:
    How many f’s are there in Fulham? (Larky answer, beloved of football fans: there’s only one f in Fulham)
    In the winter months, his R’s blew off (old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore joke, explaining the mysterious zoo sign “T OPICAL FISH, THIS WAY”)
     
    8 It also indicates plurals of words:
    What are the do’s and don’t’s?
    Are there too many but’s and and’s at the beginnings of sentences these days?

    I hope that by now you are already feeling sorry for the apostrophe. Such a list of legitimate apostrophe jobs certainly brings home to us the imbalance of responsibility that exists in the world of punctuation. I mean, full stops are quite important, aren’t they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort. Only one significant task has been lifted from the apostrophe’s workload in recent years: it no longer has to appear in the plurals of abbreviations (“MPs”) or plural dates (“1980s”). Until quite recently, it was customary to write “MP’s” and “1980’s” – and in fact this convention still applies in America. British readers of The New Yorker who assume that this august publication is in constant ignorant error when it allows “1980’s” evidently have no experience of how that famously punctilious periodical operates editorially.
    But it is in the nature of punctuation lovers to care about such things, and I applaud all those who seek to protect the apostrophe from misuse. For many years Keith Waterhouse operated an Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail , cheered on by literally millions of readers. He has printed hundreds of examples of apostrophe horrors, my all-time favourite being the rather subtle, “Prudential – were here to help you”, which looks just a bit unsettling until you realise that what it’s supposed to say is, “Prudential – we’re here to help you”. And Keith Waterhouse has many successors in the print. Kevin Myers, columnist of The Irish Times , recently published a fictional story about a man who joins the League of Signwriter’s and Grocer’s and Butcher’s Assistant’s, only to discover that his girlfriend is a stickler for grammatical precision.
    Meanwhile, William Hartston, who writes the “Beachcomber” column in The Express , has come up with the truly inspired story of the Apostropher Royal, an ancient and honourable post inaugurated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His story goes thata humble greengrocer (in days of yore) was delivering potatoes to Good Queen Bess and happened to notice a misplaced apostrophe in a royal decree. When he pointed it out, the Queen immediately created the office of Apostropher Royal, to control the quality and distribution of apostrophes and deliver them in wheelbarrows to all the greengrocers of