Spell-check and Grammar Night Classes anyone?

This sign was posted to a pole on the road to work for a week or so last autumn, near Dungarvan in Co. Waterford. I nearly crashed the car when I drove past it the first time and thinking I had been seeing things, I looked out for it later in the day when passing the same spot. This time it was on the way back into town, on the other side of the road. No chance of anyone missing it!

I thought of this when I read Kristin's post on Student Howlers, and on commenting on it realised we are both what could be kindly termed Grammar and Punctuation "Anoraks" - my kids and hubby call me pedantic and they are probably right, but I defend my right to be boringly pedantic in the interest of good English!

One of the funniest books I read in the past decade has to be Lynn Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" which is all about the mangling of the English Language by poor punctuation and grammar. The title comes from the following joke.

A panda walks into a café, sits down and orders a sandwich. After he finishes eating the sandwich, the panda pulls out a gun and fires some shots in the air, and then stands up to go. "Hey!" shouts the manager. "Where are you going? You just shot at my waiter and you didn't pay for your sandwich!" The panda says to the manager "I'm a PANDA! Look it up!" and he throws him a badly-punctuated wildlife manual. The manager opens his dictionary and sees the following definition: PANDA: large black and white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

The bugbear for all members of the Punctuation Police has to be the so-called "Greengrocer's Apostrophe" which renders every plural noun a possessive. "Apple's - 6for €1" is a good bargain but gets me off on a rant every time I see it.

The wonderfully curmudgeonly John Humphrys of BBC 4 "Today" fame has written another hilarious book on the same language assassination, called "Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulation of the English Language" . Both these books are just the tip of the iceberg of a whole genre of books that lament the sloppiness and lazyness that has resulted in kids being taught English by teachers who never learnt the basic rules of good grammar. Children who don't know how to "speak proper" are writing essays in txtspk ( has been done, in the UK an exam essay was submitted that had been written in the text shorthand that is the first language of all digit-happy children from their pre-teens).

So I was gobsmacked with the poster for the night classes, and wondered how long it would be before someone realised the bloomer. That would be about a week! The school is a very reputable secondary and post-leaving certificate college that runs excellent Fetac courses. I mentioned it to a colleague who had also noticed it. He said the principal had become aware of it, and was probably highly embarrassed that it had been printed and posted without proofing. It makes you wonder about the printers that didn't notice alarm bells ringing. I guess they didn't hear them, as I read an article this week about the havoc wreaked by homonyms (words sounding similar with different meanings: e.g. threw - through; phase - faze) that slip under the radar of the spell-checker. Proof-readers have a whole new challenge now to catch the culprits before they hit the printers.

I hope I am not being holier-than-thou in all this - it is just something that bugs me, and I am not a grammar whiz by a long shot. I was appalling in school in formal grammar; parsing and analysing sentences passed me by without as much as a glance, and I am totally at odds with the rules of adjectives and pronouns and verbs. One thing I did learn in school and at home was to spell correctly and use "proper" grammar almost intuitively - from a lot of rote-learning and by reading widely. My mother was very intolerant of lazy speech and I would never get away with quaint colloquialisms like "I done that" so I guess a lot of it is pretty ingrained.

Thanks to Kristin for inspiring this post, and apologies if I've annoyed some of you by being a tad pedantic on my crusading hobbyhorse!