It's that apostrophe again

New to this place, so don't know if there is a place for the apostrophe, but I couldn't find one.

The 'greengrocer's apostrophe' and other humourous examples were well covered in 'E, S & L' by Lynne Truss; no point in reproducing them here. But I recently found an example that deserves a wider audience.

A local pub changed hands, and as usual the new owners were keen to set out their stall. A flyer came through my letter box. It listed their new menu and exhorted me to -

"Come On Saturday Night and Experience Our Chef 's Roger and Julian's Surprises."

Wow. Glad his name wasn't 'Willy'!

I guess most people don't feel it when they're forcing a sentence into an unworkable form, so they just plow on ahead. This could have been so easily avoided by a simple rearrangement to "Come On Saturday Night and Experience Surprises from Roger and Julian, our Chefs."

They would have been quite OK with what they'd written if only they'd left out the apostrophe. It was the invitation to the chef's roger that aroused the interest. Sadly I couldn't be there that Saturday so I can't say how many were disappointed on the night, or how few were pleased.

>2 Osbaldistone:
Francis Grose defines Roger (n) as "a portmanteau; also a man's yard. Cant." But he points out that it can also mean a goose, so there is a possible culinary explanation...
The Shorter OED has much the same, but omits the portmanteau.

...also a man's yard. Cant

I think I've been short changed.
Where do I complain?

OK, I didn't realise it didn't mean the same everywhere. It's the first time I've had to spell it out.

Here's the OED (for those across the seas that's the Oxford English Dictionary) definition:

roger: coarse slang (chiefly Brit.).
trans. Usually of a man: to have sexual intercourse with (a person, esp. a woman)

So those who did turn up on Saturday night for the chef's roger might have been expecting to get ...

Sorry, but like most things, once it has to be explained it tends to lose its impact.

Ah, all clear. You are using Roger as a verb.

Don't you ever wish you hadn't started something?

I think that it has nouned a verb there

#8 Don't worry, Inkvisitor, I knew what you meant (and had a good laugh). Welcome to LT and to the group (and, assuming you're English, to many happy years of being completely misunderstood here).

Naw, not misunderstood, just every and any possible innuendo noted and appreciated :-)

>8 lnkvisitor:
If Julian's reading this, he's probably regretting that he didn't go into business with Sandy after all.

>12 thorold:
As I was typing "... Julian's Surprises" I too was reminded of Julian and Sandy, and how we used to tune in every week for the latest episode. Together with most people listening at the time the polari was lost on me; it wasn't until some years later that it was explained. And it seems that the bosses at the Beeb were also unaware of the significance or it wouldn't have been broadcast in those days. Round the Horne is sometimes repeated on BBC Radio 7. Must try to catch it some time. Had no idea that J&S had a pagette of of their own until I followed your link. J&S would have thought it fantabulosa. If memory serves, I'm sure they used to refer to Kenneth Horne as "Mister 'Orne".

I'm sorry that most of this post might be incomprehensible to most readers, but please don't ask me to explain as I couldn't possibly do so without causing even more confusion.

~7: The head of a school I joined several years ago was keen to point out that rogering the sixth form girls was not allowed. One of his many expressions I put down to his public school background.

>13 lnkvisitor:: "Radio 4 Extra", you mean? :^P
(Don't worry, I can't get used to it either, especially since they still talk about "The seventh dimension" for their spooky/SF slots...)

>15 dtw42:: Thank you, is that what it's called now? Haven't tuned in for a while so possibly missed the change. But then, I still call "Radio 3" "The Third Programme". I don't suppose many people remember that. It was before "The Home Service" became "Radio 4". They all changed at the same time with "The Light Programme" becoming "Radio 2" which is where I would have heard Julian and Sandy. Somebody told me that there was also something called "Radio 1", but where that came from or went I've no idea. Given all that, it's a surprise that I'd even heard of Radio 7, but my younger friends try to keep me informed. And thank you again for "Radio 4 Extra". Will try to remember that.

Isn't it lovely how threads warp? Many popular radio shows have been saved. ITMA; Beyond Our Ken; Take It From Here "Ooh, Ron" "Yes Eth?" particularly hit home as my parents' names were Ronald and Ethel; The Clitheroe Kid; The Navy Lark.

Did I put the apostrophe in the appropriate place ??

#14 Of course 'to roger' is a verb. The OED doesn't give a derivation, though; just coarse British slang.

But my Macquarie Dictionary is too polite to mention it which is a surprise since us Aussies can be pretty coarse at times.

Once again I get to show off my OED (DVD) The Full OED!

roger, v.1 slang.

(ˈrɒdʒə(r))

Also rodger.

f. Roger2.

trans. To copulate with (a woman); to have sexual intercourse with. Also absol. Hence ˈrogering vbl. n. and ppl. a.

1711 W. Byrd Secret Diary 26 Dec. (1941) 459, I rogered my wife. c 1750 A. Robertson Poems 98 Dear sweet Mr. Wright‥Go rodger to-night Your Wife, for ye want her. 1763 Boswell Jrnl. 4 June in London Jrnl. (1950) 273, I picked up a little profligate wretch and gave her sixpence.‥ ‘Should not a half-pay officer r-g-r for sixpence?’ 1771 see ragmatical a.. 1870 Cythera's Hymnal 81 He rogered the National School. 1884 tr. Abishag in Old Man Young Again (1898) I. 36, I gave Mrs. P―. a really good rogering, and sent her to sleep perfectly contented. 1919 E. Pound Sel. Lett. (1971) 150 If I were, however, a professor of Latin in Chicago, I should probably have to resign on divulging the fact that Propertius occasionally copulavit, i.e. rogered the lady to whom he was not legally wedded. 1931 E. Waugh Diary 14 Jan. (1976) 347 He got very drunk and brought a sluttish girl back to the house. He woke me up later in night to tell me had rogered her and her mama too. 1942 E. Paul Narrow St. xvi. 116 When Rudolph Valentino died.‥ ‘Hey, American,’ yelled Madame Absalom.‥ ‘What did that type have that other men have not? He must have rogered half the women in your country?’ 1953 Landfall Sept. 179 You black-mouth, you night bird, you rogering swine. 1953 Dylan Thomas Let. 22 June (1966) 409, I‥sulked all morning over my warm beer as they‥rolled rodgering down. 1961 A. Wilson Old Men at Zoo i. 54 I'm not at all sure about the Empress Theodora. I fancy she was rogered by an ape more than once in her circus acts. 1967 D. Pinner Ritual xvii. 167 He singed the rogering labourers.‥ It took minutes before fornication subsided. 1972 ‘R. Gordon’ Doctor on Brain xxiii. 168 ‘Who is the father of the child?’ ‘The man who rodgered her, of course.’ 1976 K. Bonfiglioli Something Nasty in Woodshed iii. 32 You won't catch him.‥ The bloke who rogered Mrs Breakspear.

Yours, showing off,

Guido.

I always thought it came from all those old jokes about 'Roger the Lodger', probably going back to music-hall days - but does that take it back as far as 1711?

It looks as though the noun goes back a bit further than the verb (the earliest quotation for roger n.2 (4) is 1644) - there are earlier uses of roger as a generic name for a gander, a ram or a manservant (as well as the obscure cant term for a portmanteau), so the noun probably comes from general association of roger with maleness, and the verb from the noun.
One of the more recent quotations for the noun in the OED is part of the wonderful list of synonyms from Larry Kramer's Faggots: "banana and bird and bone and ding-dong, ... roger, rupert, sausage, scepter, schmuck" (if I remember rightly, the full list in the original takes you through almost the whole alphabet).

>19 guido47:
I'm surprised that it isn't there in the OED as a noun as well, only the -ing form is shown in the quotes as a noun.

For some reason the OED has deemed it fit to add another quotation to the above list.
The addition is: "2003 Ice Oct. 130/3 She'd rather let them roger her senseless than sort out their filing."

I would have thought the list in #19 had enough examples, but perhaps they felt it needed a gesture toward gender egalitarianism.

>22 lnkvisitor:
Guido was just quoting the entry for roger v.1 - the nouns are covered in other entries. v.2 is the wireless-telephony sense, n.1 is a beggar pretending to be an Oxbridge scholar, n.2 is what we were discussing above, and n.3 is W/T again.

>23 thorold:
Yes, I did look at n.2 and although there are some humorous examples it doesn't quite offer the same example, but perhaps the derivation is suggested there.

Following on from #22, I've now had a chance to look at that Ice publication quoted above, and it doesn't look like the sort of place that you'd find the type of gesture I suggested. I am surprised that the OED should be looking in such places for its quotations.

I suppose the motto is "anglici nihil a me alienum puto"

Is it?

>24 lnkvisitor:: The OED looks everywhere for its quotations: as long as it is in print in an English-language source, it's potentially quotable for examples of actual English usage. The OED is not the Academie Francaise.

>22 lnkvisitor:: The recent instance will have been added to exemplify the continued usage of the term post-1976.

Reading the OED etymology notes for the noun of Roger, it's interesting to see all the cognate names historically. I hadn't made the connection with Rüdiger, and never realised that it was related to Hroðgar (as in Beowulf, IIRC).

ETA: the "-ger" bit apparently comes from OE gar, a spear. Which seems suitably phallic for the, er, extension into the verb senses...

trans. To copulate with (a woman);

Why "a woman"? One can't roger a boy? (Sorry, a "man".)

#29 My OED uses the 'B' word for that.

#29 - Reminds me of the hoary (and inaccurate) story about Captain Pugwash, and the character who was supposed to be called "Roger the Cabin Boy"!

>27 Celebrimbor:
Your points are well made, but I reserve the right to be a little dismayed that the OED doesn't look for a more substantial reference to "... exemplify the continued usage of the term post-1976". Perhaps even Alan Clark's description for his long term desire for Becky Sharp ever since he read Vanity Fair at school would be preferred to a reference from a magazine from the newsagent's top shelf. But I know that not everyone will agree with that view.

Sometimes poor old Roger gets a bad reputation for no reason.
Sometimes, though, he deserves it!

There was a young lady from Cape Cod,
Who dreamt that she'd been fucked by god.
But it wasn't the almighty,
Who lifted her nightie,
'Twas Roger the lodger, the dirty old codger, the bugger, the bastard, the sod!

>17 AlanRitchie:: "Isn't it lovely how threads warp?"

Yes, isn't it. When I posted a light-hearted (I hope it's permissable to be a light-hearted pedant) look at a what I thought was a funny mistake I had no idea where it would lead. Where else on the planet could a redundant apostrophe take us on a voyage of discovery ranging from Julian and Sandy to Beowulf. S'wonderful!

I'm starting to read The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559. and 1662 edited by Brian Cummings. On page lviii the editor comments on the fact that he has followed the texts of the original editions - and the "most controversial aspect of this will (to some readers) be the absence of apostrophes. ..... The apostrophe was a novelty of the later seventeenth century, and is not found in 1662 except in one case of new text".

And my OpenOffice spelling and grammar checker has made very heavy weather of it all; problems all over the place. It's happy about most of #33 though. Lucky old Roger. 'Twas only the "'Twas" that it didn't like there.

I've noticed the spelling checker or whatever it is in Word 2007 quite often gets 'its' and 'it's' mixed up.

#33: Loved that - not seen it before.

33> That no doubt started out as a proper limerick, with the right number of syllables and all...

I remember the last line as:

'Twas Roger the lodger the sod.

Here is the original, from The Lure of the Limerick:

There was a young girl of Cape Cod
Who thought babies were fashioned by God,
But 'twas not the almighty
Who hiked up her nightie -
'Twas Roger the lodger, by God!

>39 PaulFoley:, 44: Thanks. I was upset by the dodgy scansion (not line 5, which might have been for comic effect, but the first four) and felt that line 1 would do better with a 1-syllable noun like "girl", so am glad someone else brought it up!

The nightie/almighty rhyme I've heard elsewhere used irreverently, as in
O little Flo, I love you so, especially in your nightie, / When the moonlight flits across your tits, Jesus Christ Almighty!
all to the tune of 'The Girl I left behind me' ('Brighton Camp' in the UK).

If we've moved from apostrophes to limericks, I'd recommend Some Limericks by Norman Douglas.

Intriguing that the tags for that book include both "erotica" and "suicide".

"There was a young man from Peru,
Whose limericks stopped at line two."

"So what? said the man from Verdun."

I get a "poem a day" thru this "net" thingy.
Todays offering was, I think, appropriate :-)

A limerick can be rather funny
when the syllables are on the money.
But when none of it fits
it can give you the shits
Would you stop writing limericks, sonny?

Herbert Nehrlich

Here is what is supposed to be 'the ultimate limerick' which tells the whole sad story in five lines:

There was a young man from Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born.
And he wouldn't have been
If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn.

48> Must be in some dialect where been and seen rhyme.

Yep, Aussie.

The book was published in London so I assume that the British think that 'seen' and 'been' rhyme.

Probably the inhabitants of Limerick do as well.

This version appears in Dirty Little Limericks:

There was a young pessimist, Grotton,
Who wished he had ne'er been begotten;
Nor would he have been,
But the rubber was thin,
And right at the tip it was rotten.

And a variation on the earlier one:

There was a young girl of Cape Cod
Who dreamt she'd been buggered by God.
But it wasn't Jehovah
That turned the girl over,
'Twas Roger the lodger, the sod!

>49 jjwilson61:, 51: OED guide to pronunciation of "been" says (and let's hope the IPA characters paste happily...):
Brit. /biːn/ , /bɪn/ , U.S. /bin/ , /bɪn/ , /bɛn/ .

And for "seen" as the past participle of "see":
/siːn/ .

So there you have it. :^)
Both pronunciations work for us Brits (I think it's down do how heavily the word is stressed - we'd use the "bin" style in quick and unstressed speech, but the "bean" style if speaking more carefully). Consider Peter Sellers' rendition of "A Hard Day's Night" a la Olivier's Richard III (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLEMncv140s).

So both limericks rhyme well enough for me!

>53 dtw42:: Thanks for that link. Hadn't heard it for years, and had never seen it before.

At the very first reading, "been" and "seen" rhymed for me. I can see that it could be "b'n" in vernacular or colloquial speech but seeing it written, I read them as a rhyming pair.

Me too. Have more of a problem rhyming "been" with "thin", but perhaps that's 'strine.

I suspect "bin" and "thin'" are more likely New Zealander.
They do inhabit quite a large part of our land...eh

It's an American publisher. I would read the first 'been' in #48 ("been born") to rhyme with "seen", but I'd naturally rhyme the second with "sin" in prose...neither way is unnatural in the limerick, I guess, but "been/seen" needs a little extra stress on the last syllable.

OK, but in #48 I still see that the second "been" has to rhyme with "seen". Did you mean in #52 ?

Just been (ahem) searching rhyming dictionaries, both on my shelf and online. The (British) Oxford and Penguin rhyming dictionaries have been in the same list with keen, dean, spleen, mien, queen, scene, seen etc, while the (American) Merriam-Webster rhyming dictionary has it in the same list as bin, din, fin, grin, shin, thin, etc.

Seems that it's only on the printed page that I have have a problem with "been" rhyming with "sin".
On the other hand, in the spoken word I'm quite happy with I can appreciate the old joke :

Dustman (refuse collector), to householder: "Where's yer bin?"
Householder: " I bin upstairs. Where's you bin?"

Or the much later:

Dustman (refuse collector), to Chinese restaurant owner: "Where's yer bin?"
Chinese restaurant owner: "I bin Hong-Kong."
Dustman: "NO, where's yer wheelie-bin?"
Chinese restaurant owner: "YEAH! I weely bin Hong-Kong!"

Aaaagh! Rotfl. Please copy this to the Bad Joke thread! (I can't, I'm still on the floor.)

>61 lnkvisitor:,62

I dimly remember various Lancashire versions of that one, e.g. where a new schoolteacher from Down South asks the child "Hwhere's the bin?" and the child replies "If tha really wants ter know, ah've bin ter th' bog." (or words to that effect).

Another one that I've heard, and which I like, has the lines:

…
I bin on holiday.
…
Ok, I really bin in jail.

These are all cleaner than the version I was familiar with, in which the sheepish oriental gentleman admits to having 'weely bin' in bed with neighbour's wife...

Dialects can be such fruitful sources of amusing rhymes. For instance there's the 'Geordie' joke in which the investigative pit (coalmine) physician asks, in perfect received English English: 'Can you walk, my man?'

He receives the contemptuous response from the injured pitman: 'Work? ... Work? ... Doc I can hordly waak!!!'

This loses something in transliteration ...

Hawway the lads!

Michael and Patrick (ahem) walk into the job centre and see a card that says "Tree fellers wanted." Michael says, "Ah, an' it's a shame there's only the two of us, so it is."

Okay, now I must tell a story on my Dad. He's from simple stock; his mother quit school in 5th grade to keep house and help run the farm (in Kentucky) when her mother died. His dad had little education himself. Both were from generations of farm workers going back to the frontier days.

Anyway, he, the first in his family to go to college, was taking an exam in architecture. The question was "Is it considered good practice to put winders in stairwells, and why or why not?". You need to know that a 'winder' is the triangular step that allows the stairs to make a turn, or wind around. Anyway, being the country boy he is, he saw the word 'winders' and, in his head pronounced it with a short 'i', as in 'window', and he quickly wrote "Yes, natural light can improve safety and attractiveness".

Needless to say, he didn't get the question right, his professor got a good laugh, and my dad was mortified when he got the marked-up test back and realized what he had done. He knew better, but the acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree, especially under exam pressure.

Os.

For those unfamiliar with the dialect, in rural areas in some parts of the US, 'window' is often pronounced 'winder', with a short 'i'.

>68 dtw42:
Ouch! I'm sure that one predates the term "Job Centre" (introduced 1973, if Wikipedia is to be believed). Maybe it even goes back to hiring fairs... :-)

>69 Osbaldistone: That pronunciation of window is not limited to "rural areas in some parts of the US".

Recall Nicholas Nickleby's lessons at Dotheboys Hall, being taught by Mr Wackford Squeers:

" 'This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,' said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. 'We'll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where's the first boy?'

'Please, sir, he's cleaning the back-parlour window,' said the temporary head of the philosophical class.

'So he is, to be sure,' rejoined Squeers. 'We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It's just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where's the second boy?'

'Please, sir, he's weeding the garden,' replied a small voice.

'To be sure,' said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. 'So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows 'em. That's our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?' "

>68 dtw42: Was one of those chaps the one who got sent to a job but the foreman wouldn't take him on unless he passed a basic test in arithmetic? It went:

"Here's your first question. Without using numbers, represent the number 9."
"Without numbers?" the Irishman says, "Dat is easy" and proceeds to draw three trees.
"What's this?" the boss asks.
"Ave you got no brain? Tree and tree and tree make nine," says the Irishman.
"Fair enough," says the boss. "Here's your second question. Use the same rules, but this time the number is 99."
The Irishman stares out into space for awhile, then picks up the picture that he has just drawn and makes a smudge on each tree. "Ere you go."
The boss scratches his head and says, "How on earth do you get that to represent 99?"
"Each of da trees is dirty now. So it's dirty tree, dirty tree, and dirty tree. Dat is 99."
The foreman is getting worried that he's going to actually have to hire this Irishman, so he says, "all right, last question. Same rules again, but represent the number 100."
The Irishman stares into space some more, then he picks up the picture again and makes a little mark at the base of each tree and says, "Ere you go. One hundred."
The boss looks at the attempt. "You must be nuts if you think that represents a hundred."
The Irishman leans forward and points to the marks at the base of each tree and says,"a little dog came along and crapped by each tree. So now you got dirty tree and a turd, dirty tree and a turd, and dirty tree and a turd, which makes one hundred. So, when do I start.!"

>72 lnkvisitor:. Ouch!

Or, for the Scots accent:

Q: What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?

A: Bing sings, but Walt disnae.

(You can tell how old that joke is!)

Oh, goodness, there's a joke my dad used to tell (he was the child of Polish immigrants) that plays with Gene Autry and (phonetically) jeen dough-bre (my poor memory of the phonetic Polish for what I think meant "good day") but I cannot for the life of me remember the setup. Anyone?

My dad loved to tell a joke about an Italian who was having a house built, and wanted a "halo statue". After many attempts to please, the architect finally asked him what kind of statue and the Italian replied..."you know, it sits on table, goes "ring,ring", you pick it up and say "Halo? Statue?"

Reminds me of a story which my science teacher told us about the footballer who applied for a football scholarship at an American University. He was going to be a real asset to the university's football team but he had to pass a science test before he could be accepted:

Examiner: What colour is green vitriol?

Student: Um - pink?

Examiner: No, it is actually green. Next question: Do you know how to make hydrochloric acid?

Student: No.

Examiner: Correct. You have scored 50% and you have passed the test.

>76 pinkozcat:
Yeah, but I doubt the Examiner at said 'colour'. ;-)

Os.

>75 trishpaw:
Reminds me of a joke about misunderstandings which I won't tell. Suffice it to say that it involved a boarding house resident asking for a fork on the table.

Os.

http://theweek.com/article/index/249725/kill-the-apostrophe#

Also, can you use something "wrongly" or should it be used "incorrectly"? First paragraph.

I hold, from being taught in the fairly literate elementary schools of Western Massachusetts in the fifties, that this is wrong. It is proper to pluralize abbreviations and non-word wordlike elements (for example years) with 's, as in CD's. I know that people are trying to change that convention nowadays, but it is only a little over a half a century later, and we should not be pushed too fast by a hypercorrection.

Robert

80: Sorry, I don't agree. I hate to see CD's and DVD's (I always think 'what of CD?').
Same way with "do's and don'ts" - really? It should be "dos and don'ts".

(edit: thanks myopic, I guess I'm even more myopic (true) than you (don't know hehe))

The apostrophe indicates that something has been left out and therefore I agree with ScarletBea that it is totally inappropriate to have DVD's unless we are talking about the DVD's contents (DVD its contents).

Even the spellchecker agrees with me that DVD's is wrong. :)

It should be DVDs; I also hate to see 1960's.

81: Aye, there's the rub. You said it should be "dos and dont's", but you probably meant "dos and don'ts"!

84: oh the shame!!! of course I meant that --> I'll correct it now :)

I have never heard of a genitive formation in English deriving from the elision of a possessive pronoun; that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. But I bet that there was a genitive in Frisian. And I'll claim that there are at least two uses of apostrophes in English: for possessives and for elisions. There was once upon a time a convention with apostrophes in plurals widely enough accepted that it made it into textbooks for elementary school students. That people were taught that generally English plurals were formed without apostrophes and then hypercorrected, a common enough process in language, to remove all apostrophes in plurals does not justify a change as far as I'm concerned, at least not this early. A hypercorrection is a solecism.

Robert

Harbeck's argument seems logical, but I feel he misses the point. Just because something is dispensable doesn't mean we should get rid of it (what about airline pilots, Thanksgiving, or the UK royal family?). Written language is full of redundancy. We could probably manage rather well without any punctuation marks, spaces, or vowels (there are plenty of precedents from other times or other languages), and there are quite a few letters in the modern version of the Roman alphabet we could spare: "h", "j", "x", "y" and "w", for instance.
The apostrophe is worth having precisely because it's a harmless, low-cost way of adding expression to written language. You can make an aggressive statement by leaving it out, as Harbeck does; you can display your ignorance by putting it in the wrong places; you can enjoy the superiority of knowing where it should be placed. All of those things are part of what users want to do with language: if they didn't have the apostrophe, they would find another way, and changing the system would just make it more difficult to appreciate the subtleties of older written utterances.

But dos and don'ts sounds like me it reads like uno dos and don'ts.

>88 JerryMmm:

dos? ... aaah ... memories of the ancient 'disc operating system' that transformed 'personal' computers ...

But that was in the days when computers were used to compute, not play mindless games ...

I thought of another place where apostrophes are useful. In my youth, many of my contemporaries favoured the expletive kinell. This is much easier to explain and understand if it is written properly with the apostrophes: 'kin' 'ell.

f@#k in hell?

f*cking hell, as in, "Oh, f*cking hell!"

Robert

Ah - thank you, Robert :)

93 Exactly! (Count the apostrophes!)

I was taught that the use of swear words was an indicator of linguistic poverty. I shall remember Pedant's Corner as a useful counter-indication!

Much more expressive than MyopicBookworm's 'kinell' is the 'For cough!' frequently used sotto voce by (the pedant) Anthony Burgess' Enderby character.

I present for review this short paragraph taken from an instructional document at work.

Attendees of this review will include, but will not be limited to, Operational Quality Manager’s, Quality Systems Representatives, Laboratory Manager’s, Operational Manager’s, Non Conformance Coordinators.

I was halfway inclined to not fill out the form to say I'd read and understood this document, on the grounds that this is, as written, incomprehensible.

97: The repeated use of particular swear words, especially as mere intensifiers, is an indicator of linguistic poverty, but creativity in language can be manifest even in colloquial registers such as profanity.

There may also be some interesting linguistic phenomena involving their use. I remember once reading about the place of swear words in wartime soldiers' slang: if the sergeant said "OK, get your f**king rifles" the response was to mumble "Yes, Sarge" and shamble over to pick them up; if he said "Get your rifles" you kept your mouth shut and moved fast in the expectation of serious action.

#97/99 I'm pretty sure it was Eddie Izzard who said "I was always told swearing showed a paucity of language. That's bollocks - I've got at least half a dozen words more in my vocabulary than someone who doesn't swear has."

For International Apostrophe Day (no, me neither) in August, The Guardian's Style Guide editor David Marsh held a haiku competition.

Here are the winners

In the waiting room at my doctor's surgery is a blood pressure machine. Comprehensive operating instructions are pinned up beside it, including the statement that it can be used over thin "shirt's, blouse's, and dress's".
My blood pressure frequently measures on the high side when using this machine.

Would it be better if it said shirts, dresses and blouses had to be removed before use? Perhaps liven up the waiting room.

It is suggested that cardigans be removed.
Nothing much to get steamed up about there though.

'Cause the cardigan's in the way.

I recall that Flashman's blood pressure rose mightily on finding Cardigan seducing his wife, Elspeth!

107> Do you mean actually rogering?

Not in that episode, but within that book and others, there's a general "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" that poor old Flashy is regularly cuckolded. Not that he's the epitome of monogamy himself, of course.

Cardigan certainly wasn't known as a respecter of marriage vows in real life. Both his marriages had messy starts.

110> Typo, thorold.. .. Too many ss in the last word.

Debatable.... :-)

I have a copy of Adeline's memoirs (unoriginally entitled "My recollections") somewhere - not quite as scandalous as they're cracked up to be, but quite amusing all the same.

109> "Frequently", surely, rather than "regularly". Just maintaining the pedantry quotient.

113 Could be regularly, if he goes out to the club every Wednesday night at the same time...

Could be!

Once every year is regular.. ..

>116 Novak:
I recommend you see a doctor.

Dear pedants, I need apostrophe help. I'm trying to develop a concept for a blog and bookstore called The Bee's Book Garden. The logo idea is a single bee reading. A friend pointed out that it should be The Bees' Book Garden since they are hive creatures. Which way should I go with this? I'd rather not lengthen it to something like The Queen Bee's Book Garden for clarity, but I don't want a zealous pedant coming at me with a correcting pencil. What to do? Thanks.

Bees may be hive creatures but you are obviously speaking of one specific bee; therefore, use The Bee's Book Garden.

After all, if you are looking at a bee and are writing about its legs, you don't write the bees' legs, do you?

ETA: That may sound more abrupt than I meant it. Text can't express tone!

>119 Morphidae:

I think one says, "the bee's knees."

They live in hives, but they go foraging alone (whether for nectar or books).

>118 varielle:

Both are correct as I see it. Strangers would need to ask if you were talking of one bee or a group of bees, (a bumble ??) during which time your job is to turn them from strangers into customers.

Thank you Novak. I'll tell the bees not to worry about it.

Have you ever been bit by a dead bee?