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This thread prompts me to recommend “Eats, shoots & leaves” by Lynne Truss. Hours of fun on grammar.

I must admit I enjoy spotting when an apostrophe appears in error. Some people put one in for luck whenever they use the plural. e.g. Puppies’ for sale or even Puppy’s for sale!

Yes , aristo , from his short-lived "concrete and steel" period.

Quiet down there tonight as the team is playing in Belgium - howaay the lads !

By a strange coincidence, "Eats, shoots and leaves" (to give it its (in)correct punctuation) is named-checked in today's Guardian, which we have been discussing on the JE word play thread.

Hi Chris, I put in the ampersand after checking on Wikipedia! I couldn't find my copy of the book.

Actually, jws, I'm not sure about the ampersand - it was the comma after "eats" that Lynne Truss featured!

What you find funny I find infuriating jws!I once scrawled "I will NEVER buy orange's" on the bottom of a piece of card proclaiming Orange's 12p.
But then I once let down someone's tyre for pinching the parking space I'd been guarding.
Its and it's is one of the commonest confusions. His, hers, its happiness, it's happy time. Not that difficult.
And definite includes the word finite, so can't be finate LOL

Confusion? What confusion?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Punctuation/ApostGrocers.htm

Thank heaven you don't have the Québec language police:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/10/13/french-language-english-companies.html

The grocer's parade shows an example

"To No's 8-13 George St"
or something like that.
In this case, doesn't the apostrophe show letters being missed out? Should it be "Nos"? Actually, wouldn't it be better
"To 9-13 George St" as we can all see they are numbers anyway?
And I am very glad we don't have word police Syzzie. Goodness, what a bore.

What? You don't have word police? We certainly have them over here. Actually, I think the funniest jumping-through-hoops performances can be seen in biblical translations, and you no doubt have the kind I mean. The psalms, for example, which are sooo repetitive already, are now pronoun-free (read gender-neutral), so you see things like "God leads God's people to God's...". Does wonders for poetic flow.

Re gender-neutral -- the move to replace "man" with "person" resulting in abominations such as "chairperson".
Even Chambers waffles on that one.

How about woman -> woperson? No, still has a male component, "son".
OK, I've got it: woperdaughter! Everyone happy now?