Vigilante on mission to defend English language

Hero corrects signs with help from his trusty 'apostrophizer'

By night, he stalks the streets of the southwest English city of Bristol, weapon in hand and stepladder over his shoulder. His mission? To defend the English language against misuse of punctuation.

The man, who studied engineering, prefers anonymity, and styles himself as a "grammar vigilante".

What he does is patrol the city's silent streets after dark, watching out for street and shop signs that misuse punctuation. He then corrects mistakes with a long-handled device he calls an "apostrophizer", which allows him to delete offending punctuation.

He's been doing it ever since 2003 when he spotted a local council sign which included the phrase "Monday's to Friday's", he told the BBC earlier this year. The wrongly used apostrophes had to go. "I was able to scratch those off," he said.

Since then, he's introduced his "apostrophizer", which allows him to obliterate any bad grammar he can't reach without damaging the original sign.

And his efforts haven't been in vain.

The owners of a local garage, Cambridge Motors, publicly thanked him when he erased the apostrophe from the word motors.

Another sign which grabbed his attention and required action was a shop that bore the sign "Amys Nail's", which he described as a gross error. It was soon corrected to "Amy's Nails".

By coincidence, the vigilante hails from the same city as Banksy, Britain's best-known graffiti artist whose works have earned him a small fortune. He still preserves his anonymity, despite efforts by the media and critics to unmask him.

Punctuation can be a thorny issue for people whose first language isn't English - many is the time British visitors to France have been dismayed to see a shop with a sign promoting its famous denim trousers as "Jean's".

Jean has nothing to do with it.

The people who designed a sign at Salisbury railway station, in southern England, got it really wrong with a No Entry sign that read "Taxi's and busses only".

Damaging effect

Britain's obsession with correct punctuation was underlined by a masterful best-selling book by Lynne Truss, written in 2003, entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Read that way it tells you that someone ate, shot a gun, and then left. Remove the commas and it describes, for example, the eating habits of a giant panda.

Albert Clack, an author and actor, as well as being a retired journalist and filmmaker, believes that the incorrect use of English punctuation can have a damaging effect.

"It's important that mistakes with punctuation, particularly apostrophes, not be made in public places, because, for example, children and young people could see it and assume that it is correct use of grammar," he said.

Clack, whose best-selling books include Murder at the Theatre Royal and Murder of an English Patriot, said that when writing he uses correct English and punctuation except in dialogue, where he writes in the way he would expect a character to speak.

As an actor and former filmmaker, correct pronunciation is paramount.

"The BBC has a marvelous service called the Pronunciation Unit, which lays down how place names, people's names and other phrases should be correctly pronounced by presenters," he said.

chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com