Home found for lost apostrophe

You can't quite see it, but in line with council policy, the street sign in the distance says "St Marys Row". The missing apostrophe has found its way across the road to the sign outside this bar.

Have we stopped teaching people to write properly?

Iain Dale asks "Why is it that so many people in their twenties have v little understanding of English grammar or basic sentence construction? Aaaaaaagh."

He blames the education they received at school and wonders what the new government will do about it.

A local newspaper reader is angry...

What is it with local-newspaper journalists? Are the courses that churn them out really so bad? Or should we blame their editors? I'm sure they must know how irritating their style is, but they won't give up. You know what I mean; take our local paper the Great Barr Observer: it can never get straight to the point. It's never "Khalid Mahmood did X", it's always "A local MP did X". It's never "Great Barr School pupils have done Y", it's always "Pupils at a local school have done Y." It's at its most farcical when there is only one possibility. So Asda becomes "a local superstore" even though Asda is the only local superstore.

Are there any local papers that eschew this indefinitism? If there are, their readers are truly blessed.

Some "unnecessary" quotation marks

Seen in Shrewsbury today...

Brain affects

The BBC headline is "Research to find effects on brain of bilingualism" but the link from the front page says "Bilingual brain affects research"...

Idiot Australian

Putting "people" instead of "pepper"... This BBC article throws up a poor proofreader and an unsympathetic publisher.

Overnegation

Spot the mistake:

"Not only didn’t he attempt to sensationalize my well known and hardly unusual views of same-sex marriage, he also inaccurately reported my views on Michael Steele as GOP chairman..."