Grammar Geek

Today

This year on Easter Saturday I gave a lunch for assorted family members. I really like planning these lunches and this year thought I'd go for more, smaller, courses so that I could experiment. Purely for the fun of it, I thought I would type up a menu with suggested wines, just like some of the tasting menus we'd had on our South American tour.

"I wouldn't," advised Paul "you're pushed for time and it'll only lead to trouble."

He was right, of course. My family mercilessly pointed out all the discrepancies in my capitalisation and laughed long and loud about a single quail laying all dozen eggs, because of a misplaced apostrophe (actually, a typical  quail's clutch is about ten - twelve eggs) and failed to spot the one error that I had noticed. I'm sure this contributed to the general hilarity.

Proof-reading this blog is hard enough and, although I get Paul to help me, errors creep through. Of course, the things I write are mostly not so important that a small error can matter, but I prefer to get things right.

In My Day

One of the more thankless tasks (fortunately not my job) carried out in the Tax Office was the one involving building sub-contractors. These folk had a bad reputation for slipping between employed and self-employed categories, so to avoid PAYE they had to apply for a certificate.

To stop a trade in these documents they carried a photo of the applicant who was told that the photo had to be full-face, bareheaded etc.

The chap who had this job was a rather nerdy, pernickety sort of person and one day as he opened his post he roared with laughter. "What's the matter with these people?" he demanded. He showed me a picture submitted for a certificate showing a rather puzzled-looking chap staring at the camera, wearing on his head what appeared to be a tea-cosy, pulled firmly down.

"We tell them 'without a hat,'" sighed the officer and went to get the file. Next minute he was laughing even harder. Apparently his letter to the sub-contractor had mistakenly said "with a hat". No wonder the guy looked so puzzled.

If even nerds and geeks can get it wrong what hope is there for me?