On a recent trip to my local supermarket a while back I saw that Mini was having a promotion in the car park. All very well but then I was horrified to see a sign on each Mini about “cherishing your Mini’s”. Cherishing my Mini’s – what? The random apostrophe strikes again! I was pretty shocked and almost crashed my trolley in to a passing rugrat.
Apostrophe catastrophes are now creeping more and more in to big corporate business (as well as other punctuation and grammatical issues, but that’s for another time), whereas before it was confined to the realms of social media and day-to-day chat.
To get an advertising campaign out like that (even if it was only a local campaign) involves many people and points of approval: the client themselves, the copywriter, the design agency, the printers. Someone along the line would have had to have spellchecked it, no? Did absolutely no one notice? That then brings me on to the bigger picture and wider issue of ignorance and education and that people may simply have never been taught how to use punctuation properly. But that then opens a huge can of worms, and not Tesco Value Worms.