Thursday 23 February 2012

Apostrophe Catastrophe

Steph has forwarded a photograph of a mobile coffee stall, belonging of the Apostrophe chain. Their coffee shops are springing up all over central London. Their slogan is

“Apostrophe – the accent on taste”

apostrophe

The faulty grammar is painful enough- but the name of the company just compounds the error even more! Steph knew how much we would appreciate the picture. Thanks, daughter, you’re a star!

[btw, are there any other words in common usage ending ‘ophe’?]

16 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness! How on earth could that get out into the wild? They must be a complete bunch of illiterates! Send it to Private Eye at once - you might earn yourself £10!

    Pomona x

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    1. Thanks for that suggestion P - waiting to hear from Ian Hislop now!

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  2. Oh that's cringe-worthy. Do you think if someone pointed it out to them they would say it was deliberate?

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  3. "A strophe forms the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode." As any fule kno...

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    1. So is that pronounced Strophee and Anti-strophee then? And I DID say 'common usage' - and would point out that in 34 years, I do not recall you EVER saying antistrophe to me!! [and please, no puns about the cup won by my mother's sister]

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  4. Sainsbury have an aisle labelled cd's and dvd's and a local shoe shop has 1000's of reductions.

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    1. I notice that the shop still calls itself Sainsbury's, and McDonald's also retains the possessive apostrophe. But Morrisons and Waterstones have dropped theirs.

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  5. Oh no, that's appalling! A friend of mine has a shop and some printed leaflets she has on the counter have a rogue apostrophe. I have to resist the urge to point it out every time I'm there. The worst was a newsletter from school saying that the children "had been learning about apostrophe's". I nearly cried.

    ***Faith Hope and Charity Shopping first blogiversary giveaway open now***

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    1. I would have been tempted to send the newsletter back to the Head with the offending apostrophe ringed in red! That is inexcusable.

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  6. Frustrating, but I like that you bring punctuations to our attention. It's good for us.

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  7. Ouch! That kind of thing sets my teeth on edge.

    How about strophe and antistrophe? (Common usage, perhaps, among English majors and logophiles.)

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  8. What a catastrophe! My inner proofreader escaped, winced and groaned. Aaaaaaagh!

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  9. What a catastrophe! It never ceases to amaze me how poor most people's grammar is (hopes he has that apostrophe in the right place. Thinks one people, therefore apostrophe 's'. Leaves happy).

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  10. Argh! Eeek! Can it be post-Modernist ironic? Is it possible that anyone could be that careless? Perhaps they are generating free publicity?

    But not good publicity...

    I also came up with catastrophe and strophe. I think they are used more commonly in French (where we don't pronounce the final 'e', BTW).

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  11. Arghhhhhh! You might just appreciate this cartoon that a friend share with me on Facebook: http://edudemic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/badgrammar.jpg

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