I try not to quote too extensively here,
but this deserves an exception:
As Tom Chivers noted in yesterday’s paper,
some people are upset that The Apprentice’s Luisa Zissman has dropped the
apostrophe from the name of her business, Bakers Toolkit. Still, she’s hardly
the first. In 1968, Kingsley Amis wrote to the house magazine of the teaching
profession. Its name: Teachers World. “Shouldn’t that name have an apostrophe?”
suggested Amis. “But I suppose it is safer to drop it if you aren’t too sure
where it should go.” [I know it's bad style to butt in half-quote with
'Ha!Ha!Ha!', even if one gets his spelling right, but you must forgive me*: Ha!
Ha! Ha! ]
In reply the editor called Amis “a bit of a
pedant” and said the apostrophe was dropped “for modern design reasons”.
Thereafter in the Amis household, any instance of illiteracy was dryly
attributed to “modern design reasons”.
(By Michael Deacon, in the on-line edition
of The Daily Telegraph)
*it's my blog, in case you forget.
P.S. "Michael Deacon is the
Telegraph's Parliamentary Sketchwriter. He also writes about TV and books"
- in this order, it doesn't sound like a paricularly favourable review of his
books. (I've just realised the syntax's equivocal - or I can't read properly -
and perhaps he doesn't write books at all).
