Punctuation lovers...I know you are out there

[popsycal]

Check out this book
thoroughly recommended

ks you always express these things so gracefully, clearly, and concisely. What an excellent example too. Do you do this professionally?

Sounds like one for my Christmas list!

My personal bugbear (oh, I lie, grammatical and spelling mistakes annoy me wherever they are) is when I get a letter from school with mistakes in it. We had one last week about a special Bonfire Night school lunch, with the menu included. It listed the choice of deserts (Gobi? Sahara?) and one of the options was mouse (mmmm...yum). Wish I'd had the nerve to send it back, corrected.

Have you heard the one about the punctuation class that was asked to punctuate the following sentence:
"A woman without her man is nothing"?
The story has it the male students all put:
"A woman, without her man, is nothing" and the female students put:
"A woman: without her, man is nothing".

But regrettably I don't think many of my female students would be feminist enough to put that.

Yummy, mouse!
Dd1 loves ballet and there's a pretty top in Asda with three dancers and the slogan "beautiful ballerina's". Urgghhhh... I won't buy it out of principle!

Re. Nexus.all the dsses end in an s and I never conistently use 's or either just'

Nexus employees......
old fashioned way is Nexus' employees
but modern ways will now tolerate Nexus's employees (an exampke mentioned earlier
I personally don't like the Nexus's thing!I have been known to secretly wipe out apostrophes on our school canteen notice board!

there is a sweet shop near us which sells:
blackbullet's
bon bon's
eclair's
rhubard and custard's etc etc etc etc etc
argh!!!

My biggest pet peeve is semi-colon used like a colon to start a list, or

My siblings are; Mark; Louise; John.
Instead of
My siblings are: Mark, Louise, John.

Also dislike it when ? and ! are separated from the end of the sentence, like so !?

I am still not sure whether or not I should have corrected the spelling on my emergency consent form when being rushed into theatre to deliver dd1.

In the event I decided that on some occasions the pen is NOT mightier than the scapel. But it STILL rankles that I didn't point out that ventous (sic) has an E on the end.

ROFL about ventouse!
i imagine i would be the same
are we control freaks?!

Aaah, the greengrocers' apostrophes - tomatoe's, potatoe's etc. Might have been Keith Waterhouse who told the 'story' of the greengrocer spotting a mistake on a royal charter Elizabeth 1 was about to sign. She was so grateful she made him Apostroper Royal and decreed greengrocers could use apostrophes whenever they liked. Or something like that.

I also wish people knew the difference between brought and bought. According to Radio 4 news today, the Countess of Wessex was 'bought' to see her daughter...Really riles me. Oh yes, and the pop songs 'throwing far too much emotions at me' (Spice Girls) and the 'female of the species is more deadlier than the male'. Aaargh. Oh thank you for letting me get that off my chest!

hate commas where there should be full stops,

sorry couldn't resist

now i want to get rid of the blasted comma!

My pet hate is people getting 'amount' and 'number' muddled up eg amount of people. Even on Radio 4! Ooh, it does annoy me.

in my accent, the words 'are and 'our' sound very different
but for the kids i teach it sounds the same and it really annoys me when they write the incorrect one!
tolerant teacher hey!

a posting in our local paper under the Deaths section...

Joe Bloggs will be sadly missed by all those who NEW him.

I could stay on this post for ages and ages as this is a huge pet hate of mine but alas, I have some christmas shopping to do. This year, if you can't buy it on the internet, then sory but I won't be buying it!

where I grew up 'should have' sounded like 'should of' with obvious problems for the poor teachers.

Are there any experts out there who can confirm that photo should be photo', and phone should be 'phone?

god - how could i forget that one...
around my whiteboard i have 'should of' could of' etc up with a big red cross through them all!!!!

phone should be 'phone
not sure about photo' though

just typed "childs bed linen" in the Google search box and Google replied

Do you mean "child's bed linen"?

I'm impressed.

nw i am very impressed
google can do punctuation and everything!!!

I'm going to have to buy that book, I'm a grammer obsessive. Sad, so sad. Although dh is worse as is really pleased that his assistant has started underlining mistakes on people's CVs.

motherinferior - rofl re ventouse, reminds me of my dad who corrected phlebotomist in hosp when he (phleb) said the word came from Latin.