Enjoyed listening to Lynne Truss this morning on a programme called Cutting A Dash where she revealed how seriously she takes punctuation.

It was all about the endangered apostrophe and the vigilante groups who are out to protect it, using marker pens to add apostrophes that have been missed and sticking stickers on apostrophes that shouldn't be there. (One guy on the show was also a member of 'pipe down', a group who stick protest stickers in restaurants with muzak).

They had David Denison, a linguist from Manchester University, on explaining why people find it so hard to get the rules right, and also suggesting that the existence of 'greengrocer's apostrophe' errors is evidence that apostrophes are on the way to extinction.

Personally, I'm on the side of the exterminators even though I have some sympathy for the people who report that they feel physical pain when they see apostrophes misused.

B-)