His last column for The Daily Mail, “It’s English as She Is Spoke Innit?,” written in May, dealt with language education. He was the founder and life president of the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe, a fictional organization dedicated to combating false plurals like tomato’s and road signs like the one he spotted near Sevenoaks, with letters three feet high that read BUSE’S ONLY
Keith Waterhouse and his Daily Mail columns are mentioned in the absolutely delightful bestseller about punctuation (yes, truly) called “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” by Lynne Truss.
If he had been a sojourner in the US from time to time, like myself, then he might have founded an Association for the Right Use of Lay and Lie. I have been alarmed to note the widespread confusion of these verbs in the US, and I believe that lay is on the point of completely supplanting lie. Even mainstream media, even respectable journalists, are making this mistake. As in: ‘The police found the body laying there’ which in correct English should be ‘The police found the body lying there.’ Very soon the verb ‘to lie’ in the USA will cease referring to position and become simply a reference to mendacity. It is wrong, wrong, wrong and deeply irritating to pedantic Brits like myself.
Terry Tee, it is deeply irritating to pedantic Americans like me as well, as are all those misplaced apostrophes.
I love it. One thing I’ve always treasured is the misapplication of quotation marks, especially when quotes are misused to denote emphasis. I remember once while I was in seminary, I was talking and laughing about this with a friend when we passed a church in Sewickley, PA, with a large yellow banner hung outside. It read:
CELEBRATING FIFTY YEARS OF “FAITH”
You can’t make this stuff up.
[blockquote]The police found the body laying there[/blockquote]
Maybe the body was having sex.
One of my pet peeves is the misuse of “less” and “fewer.”
The other one is turning nouns into verbs when there are already perfectly good verbs that mean exactly the same thing. “Let’s dialogue about that.” How about instead we talk, discuss, converse, debate, or speak? “Will you author this document?” No, I most certainly will not; but I will write it if you wish.
Humph.
Suddenly I feel a need to get a cane so I can wave it while telling kids to get off my lawn.
How about bring and take? Almost always people say, “let’s bring this with us when we go.”