Grammar Nazis worldwide
need YOU to spell correctly.

Preserve our apostrophes!


Dear English language (ab)user,

After many arduous years of being forced to endure witnessing the tragic downfall of what we have all come to cherish as our native tongue, this Christmas the opportunity to make a stand and prevent this sinful slaughter has arisen. But the question is ‘do you have the strength of heart and the compassion it will take to end this brutality?’

Writers, readers and even arithmeticians worldwide cannot withstand such callous cruelty a second longer. Hyphens cower under their beds, colons huddle beneath their sheets and apostrophes wake screaming in the night because of the nauseating nightmares of abuse. You must help us put a full stop to this at once! All that you have to do is to stick up for our battered friend the comma, or end the bullying of the trusty question mark, or you could even join us in our quest to salvage the dignity of our humble yet painfully physically-abused apostrophe.

All we ask is for you to take a moment to think this year before you splash out on lavish Christmas presents for all the family. Does little Johnny really need that dialysis machine? Does great-aunty Margaret honestly require that second hip replacement? Instead of indulging in gimmicky gadgets, you could pop down to your local charity bookshop (killing two French hens with one stone) and stock up on dictionaries! Just imagine baby Harry’s face when he tears open that paper around that leafy, page-infested tome instead of the Fireman Sam deluxe Duplo kit that every other kid asked Santa for.

For the small price of a dictionary – or if you’re feeling truly generous, perhaps a thesaurus too – you can shape language forever. Educate your children and those around you in punctuation correctness. Teach them that Mr I does indeed often come before Mr E. And lastly, but most importantly, think of the pandas!

We cannot make a difference this year without your help. Teamwork and cooperation in a concerted effort is all we ask of you. Act now and condemn syntax and morphology abusers before they can offend again.

Every three seconds a punctuation mark is savagely slaughtered. Perhaps you could spare a thought for these cowering commas, these fearful full stops and these querulous question marks. Whilst you are gathered around a laden table on December 25th, will you be content in the knowledge that you have made your mark in the history of grammar recovery? Will you?

We appreciate your attention and thank you for having the kind heart to take a moment to suffer our liberal use of exclamation marks. We know we can count on you.


Miss J King

Chief Activist