I It’s, it’s ... Punctuation Woman!

N a world that desperately needs brave role models who stand for truth and decency, a caring individual from Bristol in the United Kingdom has shown us that it really is possible for one man to make a difference.

This evangelist remains masked and anonymous — as all good superheroes should — but his efforts to show the world the error of its ways can be seen each morning in the streets of his home town. Thanks to this man, Bristol is now a safer place. Its inhabitants can walk with lighter hearts, no longer having to shield their eyes from the infectious scourge of misplaced apostrophes.

On condition he remain unnamed, this man shared details of his courageous mission with the BBC and the Guardian. He emerged from a state of powerlessness in 2003 when he decided to do something about a sign that read “Monday’s to Friday’s”. Instead of lying in bed fretting about it, he got up in the dead of night and scratched out the offending apostrophes.

He has since refined and enlarged his superpowers and built himself a secret weapon, a long-handled “apostrophiser” that has enabled him to reach greater heights as he cleanses the town of extraneous punctuation marks. The man was thanked in a public statement by the owners of Cambridge Motors, whose standing in the community increased considerably once their enterprise was no longer known as Cambridge Motor’s.

Adding a missing mark is also within the ambit of the Apostrophe Avenger. He rescued the proprietor of a manicure salon from certain doom by changing her shop sign from “Amys Nails” to “Amy’s Nails”. And that’s just scraping the fingertip of his good deeds.

If this grammar vigilante had visited Johannesburg a year or so ago, he might have encountered a conundrum to test even his advanced powers. A popular corner shop used to have two signs. The one above its entrance read “Texas Cafe”. The other sign, a neon job, shone out “Texa’s Cafe”.

Like the Caped Concealer, I was immensely bothered by this rogue apostrophe. Unlike him, I did not sneak out in the wee hours and stick a piece of Elastoplast over the dark mark that besmirched Texas.

I did, however, stop there one day and, while making a purchase to legitimise my presence — outside of the Steenbras cafe in Windhoek, Texas cafe made the biggest cheeseburgers known to mankind — I politely asked the man behind the counter why there was an apostrophe in “Texa’s” on the expensive neon sign.

He did not find this an odd question. “My father established the cafe,” he said, “and his name was Texa. So it’s Texa’s cafe.”

“And what about the other sign, the painted one?”

“That,” he said sadly, “was a mistake.”

I felt as though a light of brilliant clarity had shone through the clouds on the road to Damascus. I was no longer bothered by the existing apostrophe, although I have to say that the absence of its companion on the painted sign began to irk me.

With no superpowers, I felt powerless to do anything about this.

Not long ago the cafe changed hands and the neon sign disappeared. Now the home of the giant cheeseburger is simply, if strangely, named after a US state that voted for Donald Trump.

I’m thinking of going to Bristol and signing up to be a superhero’s apprentice. How pleasing it would be to fly low over the streets in the still of the night and, with one sweep of my invincible apostrophiser, restore to a bereft suburb the glorious memory of Texa. LS

He got up in the dead of night and scratched out the apostrophes