That’s not to say they (we) aren’t mortified when an error occurs, but it happens to the best of us

There is only one thing in life worse than missing out an apostrophe, and that’s putting one in when it’s not needed.

I was in a supermarket the other day, innocently stocking up on my pickled beetroot, when I noticed one of their posters had one apostrophe too many (they meant ‘its’ but had written ‘it’s’).

I’m not sure if I should name the one in question, so let’s just say it rhymes with riddle.

It is shocking enough to see mistakes in casual writing, on Facebook and in hand-written signage, but when somebody has paid a designer, printer and maybe a proofreader to make sure their expensive publicity material doesn’t make them look silly in front of people they are hoping to take money off, you would think it would be spotted somewhere along the line.

I know what you are thinking: is he really going to go on about apostrophe abuse when he writes for a newspaper and they have been known, on occasion, to let one or two typos slip through the net? People in glasshouses throwing stones, and all that.

But newspapers, by their very nature, and especially daily ones, have mistakes because mistakes are inevitable, given the limited time available to get them to the press.

You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘deadline’ until you’ve tried to get a story or a page finished when it’s the last one and it seems like everybody in the building, from the editor downwards, is looking over your shoulder.

That’s not to say they (we) aren’t mortified when an error occurs, but it happens to the best of us.

The crucial difference is: newspaper people make errors because they are rushed and under pressure, and dealing with thousands of words a day, not because of the reasons many other people make punctuation (or spelling or grammatical) errors, which is: they don’t give a monkey’s whether the monkey needs an apostrophe or not.

In fact, journalists are not only the best informed people when it comes to punctuation – as they really needed to know their stuff from day one – but they also see themselves as guardians (pun intended) of our language.

Somebody has to stand up for the Queen’s (and more importantly Shakespeare’s) English.

We care passionately – sometimes too much. I thought about returning to the supermarket with a marker pen, to correct the error, and only decided against it because – let’s face it – they’ve printed thousands of them and sent them to every store in the chain. Resistance is futile, and it’s a curse.

When I was younger, I thought I would one day grow out of the urge to correct bad punctuation with marker pens, but as I get older, I notice it even more. I am like the kid in The Sixth Sense who sees dead people, except I see misplaced apostrophes.

No wonder my wife came home the other day to say her work colleagues had had a disagreement over the correctness of an apostrophe in a book title, and could I referee it? Not that I’m the only one in our family who suffers from it. At the recent wedding of my niece Claire to Steve, a builder, my brother, the father of the bride, joked that now we had somebody in the family who could do a few jobs around the house for us, and in return we could advise on the correct placing of apostrophes.

They didn’t really get it, but we have a saying in our family. Is that a marker pen in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see my apostrophe?