Slightly Askew

I haven’t posted for a while; naughty me.

Okay, so by now you’ll have probably heard this delightful little ditty by Noah and The Whale. It’s called Five Years Time.

Amusingly, the plebs at Censorship Central (I don’t if such a place exists, but I’m happy to go with it if you are…) have decided that the following lyric is far too disturbing:

It was fun fun fun when we were drinking;
and it was fun fun fun when we were drunk.

So on NME TV, the words drinking and drunk get that silly reverse treatment - saving our kids from such a disgraceful sentiment.

Shame on you Noah. And your whale.

And not just for your alcoholic tomfoolery, but also for your apostrophe omission.

Surely it should be Five Years’ Time.

The logic being that we don’t say one week time, we say one week’s time (and there has to be an apostrophe in this because one weeks doesn’t make any sense).

So, similarly, the apostrophe must also be used for the plural, i.e. five years’ time.

But even Hollywood gets it wrong.

I was once - I say “once”, it’ll probably happen again - confronted by someone questioning my use of the word and at the start of a sentence.

When I questioned why the position of this little word caused a problem, the response was this:

My teacher at school always told me not to start a sentence with and.

Many of my teachers weren’t particularly clever. My English teacher often changed her mind to go with the general consensus of the class. I swear on at least one occasion she stole my answer and passed it off as her own. So forgive me if I don’t really care for what your English teacher taught you.

Sadly, a simple “fuck off” doesn’t satisfy people; you have to provide evidence. Fortunately I found some on the back cover of Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words.

The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that’s all there is to it.

Thanks Bill.

The act of questioning someone else’s work is sadly commonplace. Long gone are the days when people were simply trusted to do a job well. Management consultants probably call it inclusivity. I much prefer interference. Or back-seat driving.

David Ogilvy sums it up brilliantly (as he often does).

Why keep a dog and bark yourself?

Thanks David.

If your goal is to knock people’s confidence and generating average work, keep opening your mouth. Otherwise, it’s probably better that people wonder why you don’t speak than why you bother to at all.

Just a thought:

Would a pedant, stuck alone on a desert island, still write SOS?

Because SMS doesn’t look the same upside-down.

Apostrophes are like knives: bloody dangerous in the wrong hands.

Now, as we know: apostrophes are used to denote possession or to denote missing letters.  Never plurals.  Never.  Even when it (arguably) adds a touch of clarity.

A bugbear of mine is do’s and don’ts.  It should be dos and don’ts.

Yes, dos looks like something computer programmers use, but do’s is just wrong.  There is no missing letter and no possession - so just leave that poor apostrophe out of it.

And if you’re going to persist with do’s, then for the sake of being consistently stupid, you should write don’t’s.

Pluralising common words often leads to trouble.  The following poem is from Woe is I and is rather wonderful.  (And yes, noes is the plural of no.)

Words to the Whys

Ups and downs and ins and outs,
Forevers and nevers and whys.
Befores and afters, dos and don’ts,
Farewells and hellos and goodbyes.
Life is a string of perhapses,
A medley of whens and so whats.
We rise on our yeses and maybes,
Then fall on our noes and our buts.