Apostrophe catastrophe! The rogue apostrophe is spreading like measles. It's time to fight back...



This all started with a drink. But it very nearly didn't because when I looked at the cocktail list in the otherwise swanky Charlotte Street Hotel in London and discovered that martini's (sic) were £10.50 and classic's (sic) £10.50 I momentarily lost my thirst.

The price was bad enough. But did you have to pay extra if you wanted to have your drink correctly punctuated? And would a martini - mine's made with Plymouth gin, please, very dry, shaken with a twist - taste as good if it also contained a stray apostrophe?

Caught up in a spasm of punctuation-rage I, perhaps slightly aggressively, asked the poor waitress what those two utterly extraneous apostrophes were doing there. She backed away hurriedly and sent over the assistant bar manager.



Mariusz Szymecki may have been Polish but his English was fluent. Or almost fluent.

'Both spellings - martini's and martinis - are correct,' he said firmly. 'I know this is right because, when I heard what you wanted to know, I checked it on Google.'

On Google? Who in the name of a thousand question marks would rely on Google to be an authority on anything, least of all a grammatical matter?



The internet is awash with misspellings and punctuation solecisms. Nor is it much better out there in the real world. And the poor apostrophe is the subject of more abuse than any other dot, dash or squiggle.

For decades the nation's pedants have sighed and tutted over the so-called greengrocer's apostrophe - the one you find on piles of fruit and vegetables advertising the fact that apple's and banana's are for sale by the pound or kilo when no apostrophe is required to complete the plural.

If only apostrophe errors were confined to market stalls! Instead they have spread like a contagion, infecting public signs and notices, literature from reputable institutions, menus and shop signs - not to mention press releases, letters and emails.

According to a new study, the apostrophe causes more problems than any other punctuation mark. Almost half of 2,000 adults who sat a simple test were unable to use it properly.

But is anyone really bothered? On Newsnight last week even the great interrogator Jeremy Paxman seemed prepared to shrug off the apostrophe problem, saying: 'Maybe it's redundant now.' Or if Paxo had his way, 'maybe its redundant now'.

Nonsense! It may be under threat, but we should stand up for the simple apostrophe.

We should defend its honour - as the Daily Mail's own Keith Waterhouse has done for some time, with his organisation the AAAA ( Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe).

I decided to spend a day policing apostrophes. Surely if people realised the error of their ways they would be moved to do something about it, wouldn't they?



I am barely awake when I stumble on my first howler, on the sandwich board outside the Shiraz Cafe, a greasy spoon on Hammersmith Road, West London, between my flat and the office, advertising 'pasta's, jacket potato's and panini's'.

Inside, Roshi, the Iranian proprietor, smiles beatifically when I inform her of the problem.

'I don't care,' she says mildly. But I do, I say. I don't add that the sight of an airborne curl of black where there should only be the white of the page stirs in me feelings of biliousness. I had worried that this might be a bit of an overreaction, until I read popular grammarian Lynne Truss on the subject.

Strict: If you still persist in writing: 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning according to author Lynne Truss

'No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice,' writes Truss in her bestselling Eats, Shoots And Leaves. 'If you still persist in writing: 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.'

Goodness. Fortunately, wandering around Hammersmith, Kensington and Notting Hill I don't find a single aberrant it's. I do, however, find wheelbarrows full of greengrocer's apostrophes. There is one at an odds-and-ends shop advertising 'Pashmina scarf's' for £3 each.

'Yeah,' says a shop assistant when I take him to task on it. 'I know it's wrong. But someone else did that sign. He left about a month ago. We might get round to changing it.'

There are several more offenders on the menus of nearby cafes and bars. There is even one, threatening to 'copy plan's', plastered on the window of Copywell, a printing and copying centre.



Surely it should be incumbent on a printer to put his apostrophes in the right place. I drag a charming young graphic designer called Anam Islam out on to the pavement to show him the problem.

'Yeah, that is wrong,' he admits. 'And I did that one. It's funny because I was watching a documentary on apostrophes the other week and thought that I always got them right.'



Perhaps one of the reasons we remain so confused about the apostrophe is that it is relatively new to our language. The last punctuation mark to be standardised, it has been around in its present form for about 150 years.



The Oxford English Dictionary says the first record of the actual word 'apostrophe' in English is in Shakespeare's late 16th century play Love's Labour's Lost and that it is rooted in the Greek for ' turning away, or elision'.



This makes perfect sense: originally an apostrophe's job was merely to indicate the omission of letters, and this remains one of its most basic - and easily understood - tasks.



You need only think of contractions such as can't and daren't, dates such as the '80s or poems such as A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns - 'Till a' the seas gang dry my dear/ And the rocks melt wi' the sun' - to see how it works.



And yet for some reason many people seem to find it tempting beyond belief to apply apostrophes to a word as if they were visual garnish.



It's not just fruitsellers who do this: a barrister friend shows me a letter to a judge positively strewn with extra apostrophes.



Plurals of abbreviations or acronyms are particularly prone to this treatment. How many times have you seen a sign offering CD's? And another friend, a policeman, tells me he often comes across ASBO's.



Serial offender: Greengrocers are regular offenders when it comes to putting apostrophes in the wrong place (file picture)

But worse than that, after popping into Nationwide Building Society to pick up a leaflet on savings, I find it blithely expounding on the subject of ISAs (fine) but also ISA's (not fine).



I phone the press office to remonstrate. 'The apostrophe shouldn't be there, no,' admits a jolly man on the end of the line.



'It would appear to be human error, though rogue apostrophes do seem to be increasingly prevalent. We'll try to remember to take it out on the next print run.'



By now I have been staring so hard all day at apostrophes that I am beginning to lose it. I can see them when I close my eyes, crawling like dark, specky insects across my retina.



And I haven't even tackled their possessive use yet.



According to the latest study, this is where people really struggle. Most of us are fine with the fact that, as well as missing letters, apostrophes are used to indicate possession.



So, the bike belonging to the boy could be written as 'the boy's bike'.



But what if the boy's name is James? Do we refer to James' bike? Or to James's bike?

It started with a drink: Victoria Moore's rage about misplaced apostrophes began when she saw martini's (sic) were £10.50 on a hotel menu

And what if there are several boys, all with bikes? When brain is engaged, most people are happy that the correct answer is 'the boys' bikes'.



But for some reason we are not entirely comfortable with this end-of-word apostrophe, particularly when it falls at the end of a sentence.



It's an aesthetic objection and we deal with it by. . . just missing off the apostrophe. Because we feel like it. Here are two examples: Visitors Toilet (seen in a hospital); Parents Association (countless schools).



As I am musing on this, an email arrives from a PR contact inviting me to a Ladies Social Evening.



Just as I finish emailing prissily back, 'Dear Ellie, Shouldn't it be Ladies' Social Evening?' my friend Tanya phones. 'Oh God, who cares about apostrophes?' she says, 'I think people who are uptight about them probably make terrible lovers.' Is there a chance I am taking this too far?



John Richards does not think so. Based near Boston in Lincolnshire, he is a retired journalist with bushy eyebrows and an absolute intolerance of misplaced apostrophes.



'It makes me feel despair more than rage,' he confides. 'I set up the Apostrophe Protection Society four years ago. I have tackled people in person. Usually offenders just get letters. I've sent out thousands. You can only plug away.'



Mr Richards blames ignorance and laziness for our troubles. He is engaged in a minor squabble with the proprietor of a local teashop who insists on offering customers tea's.



'When I asked him about it he said he wouldn't change it because he thought it looked better with one in. What can you do? Needless to say, I haven't been in there for a tea or coffee.'



But what's this? Mr Richards has also written a letter of complaint to the sainted Lynne Truss. He claims she has got something wrong. Before I tell you what it is, perhaps you could try to answer the following question. Which is correct?



(a) Dos and don'ts (b) Do's and don'ts (c) Do's and don't's The answer, according to Ms Truss, is (c). She says that for plurals of letters and certain words then an apostrophe is required.



For example, if you were asking how many s's there are in Mississippi or talking about the noise a crowd made on bonfire night - 'There were lots of oooh's and ahhh's.'



The answer according to Mr Richards is (a). He says: 'Lynne Truss can write what she likes but she's got to justify why you might use one when there are no missing letters and no possessive sense.



'There is no role for the apostrophe in plurals at all.'



Who will arbitrate? Well, David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, isn't one for taking sides but he does believe that apostrophes in plurals are sometimes necessary.



'What if I ask you to dot your i's and cross your t's? How will you spell that? If you didn't use an apostrophe you'd have the word 'is' instead of i's.'



As he puts it in his book The Fight For English: 'Inserting an apostrophe is as good a way as any of showing there is an unusual plural.'



But Crystal goes further, and makes a good case for there to be a little more leniency in tricky circumstances.



'Punctuation has always been a matter of trends,' he says. 'Commas, hyphens, semicolons, apostrophes - all have been subject to changes in fashion.



Thinking about these issues as a two-part solution (correct vs incorrect) doesn't help.



'As with many linguistic issues, there are three solutions - correct, incorrect and optional (i.e. can't decide!). Pedants forget about context, which is what removes ambiguity in most cases.



For example, in the case of the Parents' Association, there could be no such thing as an association for one parent, so the apostrophe is simply unnecessary, which is why most people leave it out.



'The other thing people forget is that when the rules were drawn up 150 years ago, it was by printers who forgot about exceptions - such as some plurals - that had been in the language a long time.'



This is the point at which I decide I have had enough of apostrophes. Yes, it will still distress me to be offered a list of martini's or cocktail's. But I think in future I may require a more niche challenge. It's time to protest against the split infinitive.



