I love the BBC’s story today about the shadowy ‘Grammar Vigilante’ of Bristol – an engineer by day who goes out in the dead of night, doing his part to clean up the city by tackling grammar atrocities on shop signs.
What fantastic public spirit and passion for accurate language.
He’s put his engineering skills to use by inventing the wonderful ‘Apostrophiser’ to fix his most-hated grammar error – an eight foot-long stick with a tool on the end to obliterate erroneous apostrophes and insert the right ones.
And he puts great care he puts into his work – meticulously matching the colours of the original signs.
What started out as a one-off outing to fix a particularly offensive sign for “Amys Nail’s” has turned into an on-going mission/obsession for the elusive figure.
Asked if he believes his actions are crimes, he says:
“It’s a worse crime to have all these errant apostrophes on shops and garages. I just think it’s going to teach the youth of tomorrow the wrong grammar.”
Can’t argue with that, can you?
Click below for a brief BBC clip:
For more, listen to the Radio 4 programme ‘The Apostrophiser‘ at 8pm tonight.
