"It’s more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong."

April 4, 2017 6:01 AM

He's not the hero Bristol deserves. He's the hero Bristol needs. The BBC caught up with the Banksy of grammar:

The self-proclaimed "grammar vigilante" goes out undercover in the dead of night correcting street signs and shop fronts where the apostrophes are in the wrong place.

posted by Etrigan (35 comments total)

I saw a snippet of this chap on the news yesterday, he was walking around with a huge contraption. I suspect his days are numbered
posted by Fat Buddha at 6:09 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I assume he hits "inappropriate" "quotations" "marks" as well? That's an even bigger crime than a misplaced apostrophe.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:16 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

We need more hero's.
posted by Chitownfats at 6:25 AM on April 4, 2017 [11 favorites]

Guerilla Servant Forged an L.A. Freeway Sign to Help People Avoid Getting Lost

Its good to pickup litter, to.
posted by notyou at 6:29 AM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

We need more hero's.
Its good to pickup litter, to.

You people are monsters.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:34 AM on April 4, 2017 [14 favorites]

I agree with Big Al 8000: your monsters.

Also, this is so Bristol. Such a great place.
posted by ambrosen at 6:35 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

Send him to my town so he can fix the street sign near my house: "Dicken's Drive".
posted by crazylegs at 6:38 AM on April 4, 2017

It could be Weird Al in disguise. He's been known to fix signs.
posted by bigmike485 at 6:43 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Dude might actually die if he walked past the grocers or butchers in my town. Apostrophes before every single s, sometimes when it's just part of the word and not even a plural! "Cres's"!? They must be doing it on purpose.
posted by Dysk at 6:56 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

He's the Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson (previously) of the UK. I wonder who their counterparts are in other countries.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:01 AM on April 4, 2017

My hero! (Other articles say he uses stickers to cover errant apostrophes, otherwise I would Strongly Disapprove.)
posted by lemonade at 7:05 AM on April 4, 2017

Ive thought for a long time we should solve the whole problem once and for all: get rid of apostrophes altogether. Everyone makes a complete dogs breakfast of them and they dont actually mean anything, theyre just a spelling convention. Wed soon get used to it. Obviously pairs like Ill/ill cant/cant and wed/wed would be confusing at first but we manage to cope with tear/tear, row/row, lead/lead and polish/Polish. The apostrophe can join the ſ, þ and ȝ as a historical curiosity.

But I expect pedants would just find some other linguistic shibboleth to wang on about.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 7:20 AM on April 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

Let's chip in and get him a Lycra outfit and a cape.
posted by theora55 at 7:20 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

The apostrophe thing seems a little pedantic to me; but then I've recently been fantasizing about fixing all the signs in my neighborhood for the street ignominiously labelled as "Avenida Manana." The letter "n" and the letter "ñ" are two different letters. "Manana" is not a proper Spanish word; it doesn't mean anything in that language. The word is "mañana," which means "tomorrow" and in some contexts implies "morning." Somehow that seems worse, the cultural bureaucratic stupidity that leads us to misspell basically every Spanish word with an "ñ" in it on every official sign, even here in New Mexico.

The whole southwest is terrible about this, incidentally. I grew up in Colorado down the road from Cañon City, although the signs on the highway all referred to it as "Canon City," which is presumably just around the bend from Fanfiction Gulch.
posted by koeselitz at 8:15 AM on April 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

crazylegs: “Send him to my town so he can fix the street sign near my house: 'Dicken's Drive'.”

"Dicken" is indeed a name, although a bit less common than Dickens. For example, there's a Youtube guy called "Dicken." There is a Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Dicken," which also includes a town in Kentucky.

So... maybe your town's street sign got it right? (Probably they got it wrong, but it doesn't hurt to hope.)
posted by koeselitz at 8:23 AM on April 4, 2017

Everything old is new again. Maybe this time they'll take the hint and not muck with federally owned property.
posted by Mayor West at 8:31 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Missing tildes are annoying but worth it for the few people who, at New Year's, wish you a prospero ano y felicidad.

Last summer I was walking around the San Polo district of Venice, where someone feels very strongly about double consonants (common in Italian, less so in Venetian).
posted by Pallas Athena at 8:36 AM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

If he were a true pedant, he'd develop a machine that fixes the kerning once he erases the apostrophes.
posted by gladly at 9:20 AM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

Your all terrible with you're "grammer" police behavior's
posted by freecellwizard at 9:28 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

The "grocer's apostrophe" never caught on in Southern California where Mr. Ralph and Mr. Von couldn't even put them in the signs with their names on them.

Weird Al is the current King of Pedantry; extended to the single best song on his most recent album.

But what does this all have to do with Kelsey Grammer?
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:07 AM on April 4, 2017

Bloxworth Snout: "The apostrophe can join the ſ, þ and ȝ as a historical curiosity."

But... the thorn makes the best emoticons!

:þ

Won't someone think of the emoticons?
posted by caution live frogs at 10:08 AM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

I saw a snippet of this chap on the news yesterday, he was walking around with a huge contraption.

And then the murders began.
posted by etherist at 10:49 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

So shouldn't someone tell the poor guy that orthography isn't generally considered to be "grammar" by people who actually knows that they're talking about?

(next you're going to tell me that he's not actually a vigilante either)
posted by effbot at 12:55 PM on April 4, 2017

We need a name for this new punctuation superhero, how about Colon Man ?

(Another Bristolian here :) )
posted by Dr Ew at 1:08 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

He needs a sidekick though, how about Tilde Swinton?
posted by Miss Otis' Egrets at 1:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

I find grammar nazism such an irititating form of status signaling - and sadly I work in communications so I see it all the fucking time.

Newsflash, nazis, your ability to pompously declaim about a few, mostly arbitrary, rules does not make you a superior person. Indeed, it didn't even make you a superior writer or communicator.

Imagine going around and telling people why your disagreed with their outfit choices or how they are wearing their scarf wrong. Shut up. No one cares.
posted by smoke at 2:17 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

The apostrophe thing seems a little pedantic to me; but then I've recently been fantasizing about fixing all the signs in my neighborhood for the street ignominiously labelled as "Avenida Manana."

I vote for changing the "M" to a "B," because who wouldn't want to live on Avenida Banana?
posted by Dip Flash at 2:58 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yeah, smoke, you tell 'em!

Shut, up. Know one care's!
posted by BlueHorse at 9:06 PM on April 4, 2017

Imagine going around and telling people why your disagreed with their outfit choices or how they are wearing their scarf wrong. Shut up. No one cares.

Fellow pedants, if you're left wondering whether maybe we're the baddies, consider that there is a way to use your talents as a force for good. General-purpose communities often have people who are not native English speakers that want to learn how to speak more "correctly". If someone asks for help, that is the moment to spring into action!
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:18 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I vote for changing the "M" to a "B," because who wouldn't want to live on Avenida Banana?

Let’s all go down the Strand!
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 11:56 PM on April 4, 2017

I used to drive by a small park labeled, "Alexander the Great Park". I badly wanted to add a comma after 'Alexander', but never got around to it.
posted by closetphilosopher at 5:58 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

In the interest of economy, I propose that we recycle extra apostrophes into Oxford commas and mail them all to Nelson Mandela.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:23 AM on April 5, 2017

I suspect that the egregious example he cited as a motivation, “Annes Nail's”, was at least semi-deliberate; not so much a mistake as a Kardashian-esque reclaiming of the coding of “dumb” as a symbol of fun and/or freedom.
posted by acb at 6:57 AM on April 5, 2017

grammar nazi

I increasingly wish this phrase would go away.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:16 PM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

I increasingly wish this phrase would go away.

I wish we lived in a world in which Nazism was so soundly extinct that it was OK to use its name to hyperbolically describe mildly annoying pedants.
posted by acb at 7:03 AM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]