My Bete Noire

There aren’t many things that get me worked up (well, there are, but that’s another story …) biut one thing that gets my goat and which I get out of all proportion is poor grammar.

I was watching Law and Order on the Hallmark channel last week when they ran a trailer for some movie season showing “on Wednesday’s” (sic). Why the apostrophe – it’s just a plural for God’s sake! It annoys me when I see similar examples outside greengrocers’ shops (“Loose Potato’s 40p per kilo”) but when you see it on screen when it should have been checked by God knows how many people it makes it worse.

While I’m at it I also detest the use of ‘of’ instead of ‘have’, as in “I would of done it but I couldn’t be bothered.” That’s just unforgiveable. In speech it may be difficult to distinguish between the two words, especially with certain accents but when it’s written down it’s horribly ugly.

May I recommend to fellow pedants the Lynne Truss book ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’ and the John Humphrys book ‘Lost for Words’. Both contain a large number of examples of manglings of the English language that will make your blood boil and have you despairing for the future of our language.

I think I have become a grumpy old man.