The Daily Telegraph

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a bad apostrophe

- Jane shilling Read More at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

We Brits are, on the whole, a phlegmatic lot. Only a few things are guaranteed to make us really cross, and most of them involve that priceless treasure, the English language. Grocers’ apostrophe­s, the random misuse of qualifiers by sports commentato­rs (“His head literally exploded”), and the mispronunc­iation by BBC continuity announcers of perennial pitfalls such as February/ Febuary and controvers­y/ controvers­y – all seem to have the power to provoke feverish levels of fret.

The latest skirmish in the language wars concerns William Blake’s gravestone. The poet was buried in an unmarked grave on his death in 1827, but his resting-place in Bunhill Fields was discovered in 2006, and fund-raising began for a suitable monument. An elegant gravestone, engraved with lines from Blake’s prophetic book, Jerusalem, is to be unveiled on August 12, the anniversar­y of his death. But this solemn moment has not arrived without a degree of grammatica­l hoo-ha.

Blake’s punctuatio­n was notably haphazard and the lines in question exist in two versions: one, in his private notebook, is innocent of punctuatio­n, while his published version reads thus: “I give you the end of a golden string,/only wind it into a ball:/it will lead you in at Heavens gate,/built in Jerusalems wall.”

The Blake Society chose to go with the unpunctuat­ed version, a choice that has distressed some members. “Some people can be incredibly pedantic over punctuatio­n,” remarked Tim Heath, the society’s chairman, in the weary tones of a man who never wants to hear the word “apostrophe” again.

This literary spat is the latest eruption of a debate that has simmered steadily since Caxton’s time. Is there such a thing as “correctnes­s” in language? Yes! insist the Prescripti­vists. Whatevah! riposte the Descriptiv­ists. I spent years as a Telegraph sub-editor, ruthlessly whacking split infinitive­s with my copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, so my head sides with the Prescripti­vists. But my heart belongs to Dr Johnson, who wrote, “Sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakin­gs of pride.”

As Emmy J Favilla, the copy chief of Buzzfeed, observes in A World Without Whom, her useful guide to modern style, “Our presentday approach to using punctuatio­n thanks to the idiosyncra­sies of the web is nothing short of beautiful.” Myself, I would have put a comma or two in that sentence – but after all, who cares to lash the wind?

Scorchio! – as they used to say on The Fast Show. The cause of the present heatwave is apparently something called the “Mediterran­ean melt”, which is not a term of disapproba­tion from Love Island, but a blast of Spanish hot air that has brought temperatur­es higher than those in Acapulco to these mild, damp isles.

George II is supposed to have described the British summer as “Three fine days and a thundersto­rm”, and the effects of prolonged sunshine have been disconcert­ing. As travel agents slash the price of foreign holidays and farmers gaze at the cloudless heavens in dire foreboding, a certain languor – almost (how can I put this?) European in nature – creeps over the country. Along the waterfront in Greenwich an evening passeggiat­a has even begun. Whatever next – siestas?

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